Soil HIA THE WInD
by Maurice Rowdon


fencle a1
Uho sts Cn 2 3 vein h
ver
fhe ua amies bei lan 5
ll a aad - nily louni ml t.
bsay
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ahol nppl. aLe
ini ah vccenial zeu Trane 2 Itue
hur
kayme reue - Juie
Bue danus
benis. She F
Ie sollon t emd
SOPHIA
te i tuno ) proguy
A Cncl
hugr Uta I
- lov
Itet 21 cula Itot lo
anpplies
- Inns
Wre te cye 2 wrid su THunl eye) opius
Cajna chakn) Shiva ard Parvall lose
Aer srxnal halw ard beoue e hamephrdit,
Buc e SAHASCRA heymal Ite ejia
fliis
chakn (Hattroat) Du the final
Co uue uth He
lo00-pekA
geit 2
restahvt thelfp.
lota, Sexulis may
sexnal
1 Ihe SAHASRAKA Ikay ac i
m gois
tiv lwhed V lta in :
20yan rt (on tte sery acm
N-ple, a G hemmb-h 2 Vyh, and
Hood ftem, tre hul helinid
mali
uy l'd Come h - Mee A Lo feal
V unldit al uslu ie alen y time
Unnce ls te
- hehuns Jee te enrd


tthe trer,ie wu al ufeel, 2 E u f
HonHee hefit ue
Aur unl
rhe
leynk and hn aot 7 tlue uol - -
Vha Ite tyy
bar cluuned awuy
k ik pun 2
hen
fupun nfai u wu (rie orutlegg -
And
le tus veil 7 aluce feu uhu
a L
aud xaged, aud hei al 2 38 Yen 1
algs 1- clsrl
exls
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ataste
l HA hy hem Lrt de
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he c m, Inuel ( - 8lood tn - the duxg
ck uot
ho 5 Keal ard cereh us cyyu,
a uunle - he eile A
t tnu dou i7 gurd.


A colleague of mine described this book, which she
read in manuscript, as the r work of a fossil trying to
acgieve flesh and blood.
I accept that.
But who se esle
else would have had the patience to pick up so much gossip,
and systematise it into an indexed compendium of hidden
desires?
I also admit what she says, that the titles in this
book are 'ridiculous'. I like 'The Sophian Map of Love'
but 'The Garden Inclosed' is ridiculous. That convent is
such a damp place, after all.
My colleaque's retire dnow.
She learned English
from sailors in the war, as a child, and began reading
any Anglo-Saxon books she could lay her hands on. Her
profession used to be an honoured one in Naples, in the
sense that it was institutionalised. Walking the streets
is sadder, now that the institutions are no longer there.
This is why I call her a colleague. I said that a bachelor's
life is disgraceful. I am a whore twice over---once fro
being that, and once for being a university mane You
see, we get used to giving ourheat hearts, my colleagues on
the streets and I, on a salaried basis.


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How
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Moged
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sirn
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war C EmLTs
Ledical


SOPHIA
MAURICE ROWDON


CONTENTS
1. The Harlem Heresies.
2. The Sophian Map of Love.
3. The Garden Inclosed.


voices aser mr
In kere
Noiver.
HERNAPHRDITAS - wo is lsth
malc aed fende
NOTE
I can only say that this book has been invaded by people all talk-
ing in the first person. It is sometimes difficult, I admit, to dist-
inguish one from another, since they often do not announce themselves
or even take trouble to identify themselves through indirect means, such
as a tic we could recognise. Their tones of voice tend to be the same. Nanely
Sophia's voice, as we learn to expect, is hardly different from a man's.
Also it has been difficult for me to take it all down, not only from the
point of view of speed (they pause for no one) but because I myself often
find it hard to identify the speaker. In fact I know as little about
them as anyone else. I hardly know the island where they all presumably
live. I was there once or twice. I never went to the Manhattan apart-
ment. Nor have I actually seen these people who have chosen to distate
to me in the first person, and who Hoften use me as a vehicle for their
quarrels. I could say something clever such as that like all human
creatures these are entirely imaginary. But this is not the truth.
They must have existed. They must still exist, if only because they
continue to talk to me-but I had to stop the book somewhere in order
for it to be a book and not a record stretching to the end of the world
(imminent as that may be).
None of these characters claims to know me. I call them characters


for convenience, although they are mach more real than any 'characterist-
ics' could convey. I have often wondered what they would think of me,
and of my record of what they tell me (I sometimes have to finish a sent-
ence or even a paragraph in my own way, when I miss something), just as
I try to gibe a quick pointer as to who is speaking by a key-word here
and there). When I have been unable to identify the voice I have written
Who spoke?'. But even these two words I cannot claim always to be my
owng another voice plants them for me, for the good reason that he or
she cannot identify the spealjer either.
I imagine these people have problems like the rest of us, I mean
problems that weigh heavier than the actions to resolve them (or the
pleasures that follow Etr their resolution). They too must be in the
worldwide struggle for survival, even (I might say especially) those en-
closed in the convent, because no one-rich or poor-on mainlands or on
islands-can escape it. But they hardly ever talk about it. Some of
them, it seems--like the banking gentleman with the silver-knobbed cane
(this is the only way I can identify him, as I identify another with the
nickname 'Aaront)-spend only a small part of the year on the islands
the rest is taken up with money-making. He does talk about Wall Street
and Threadneedle Street. And the egotism from which the money-making
drive springs does make him mention the struggle more than the others.
But his most concerned thopphts are on island-matters: maybe because he
just happens to be there at the moment. It is the same with them all:
the real struggle, or rather tha reality, starts when their working day
finishes, or when they flop out for a ten-minute siesta in the dog-hours.
What kind of a person is the wife of the man with the silver-knobbed
cane, the 'renegade' as a couple of the other characters call him? Why
doesn't she speak? And what about all those other people on the island


(it has a population of at least twenty thousand) who know and even have
close relations with these people? Why do they never talk? Perhaps they
will talk to me later. Perhaps their voices will roll away to other
themes. I have an idea that they in fact do talk about their daily sur-
vival problems all the time, but such thoughts do not get through the ether,
lacking function beyand the encapsulated area of the body, and therefore
lacking style and power. But they are developing all the time, these
people, andsoon, one day, they too may take voice, tike those 'unhappy
few*, as one of them calls them, who do the talking (and who sometimes seem
to know the only real happiness).
Still, I would have liked something from those other people, living
out their self-ordained cycles of pleasure and pain without much chance,
that is desire, of liberation. I would have liked to know how the 'ren-
egade' and "Aamoni and Aaron's wife, and Sophia herself, and Sister Brig-
itte, and Cassandra, and the Madison Agenue hairdresser, really look.
But perhaps I am not so interested after all. Br perhaps I know.
And of course I suddenly realise that I could describe each of them in
physical detail. Even that #silent wife of the 'renegade' I seem to
be abde to see.
In any case, individunlismpollapsed with the nineteenth century, and
therefore the novel ptoo, that chronicle of 'manners', useless now that out
manners are all the same, a veil (carelessly chosen) for silent evolutions
mdemmeatt which comprise our real lives- So there is no need to 'des-
cribe'.
They have addressed these thoughts to me, and I address them in turn
to whom? But have they addressed them to me, and not simply felt the
need to speak them? Have I done more than a spontaneous, even paypovian
thing by writing them down in what looks like a narrative form? I have


tried to divide their voices by means of paragrapghs, but often they change
subject in the course of a monologue and I am forced
Fotpeerel to make
a paragraph division to denote this. But then, does it matter that we are
not always clear at first as to who is speaking? Don't they sometimes,
even often, speak each other's thoughts? I have been struck, for instance,
by the way Sophia speaks thoughts that seem typical of the Mother Superior.
Clearly, too, they are talking not only to me or even primarily to me but
to each other, as I perhaps am talking to them about my own life. But
why, unlike most of them (at least as far as I can judge), do I take their
thoughts downen ink, and always in the summer? This 'book' has taken three
or four of those summers. To answer the second part of the question first,
perhaps their thoughts only form themselves sufficiently in the calming
Mediterranean heat, and in relative leisure. For the rest of the year
they are too 'busy', which for most of them here seems to mean "unreal'.
They turn theboncept of the 'drop-out' upside down: for them it is the
city-rat, racing like mad, who is hungrily escaping reality, with his hope
that comfort will exorcise the fear. We must remember that they them-
selves become city-rats for part, usually most, of the year.
Now for the second part of that question. I believe that I take
these thoughts down (I am continuing to do so, as I say, beyond the arb-
itrary limits of a "book', which word after all only refers to the part of
the bark or beech on which words were originally written) in order, first,
to address them back to the speakers, secondly to address them to other
people like myself whose play in life is books or pictures or sculptures
or music or simply prayers. That is, we address our thoughts to our-
selves, and are revealed by themg self to self. Or, as Sister Mahatma
would say, self to Self, and Self to self. With the phasing-out of that
great machine called the nineteenth century, which it took so long to
build (through how many holy murders and new enslavements), we have
reached a time when there are more actors and playwrights and directors


than audiences to see their work, more sculptors than viewers of stone,
more musicians than listeners, more thinkers than followers, however bad
the music, the plays, the thoughts. This is just how things are. People
have thrown off the social identifications which the nineteenth century,
imposed on them (and still to a certain extent succeeds in imposing on
them, by virtue of the extent to which we all live in the past), and now
choose their, roles not simply at will but on whim, even if they cannot
perform them or understand what they properly ares we must expect musicians
who have netther ear for music nor the power to make it, and thinkers whp
choose to be so by virtue of their being utterly thoughtless people.
The reason is that everyone is trying to silence that unreal part of them-
selves, the 'busy' part, which takes up the bulk of the space and the time,
by talking themselves into the real part which seems close to dreams only
because it induces the total loss of salf-identification.


THE HARLEM HERESIES
After wandering many days I at last found myself between a woman's
legs, which is where all of us begine It is worthwhile to remember this
origin. They were a woman's legs, not a man's. I suppose all my life
has been concentrated on that one fact. The woman whose legs I wandered
into was a raw, long-haired peasant girl with eyes that glowered without
the slightest light in them. My father was a prince, poor devil--I
mean he wasn't a real prince but what they call a prince among men.
And he did have royal bloode He was
pantr
a child was as
black as ebonys on the beach. I was in and out of the water like
Amphibia, crawling out of the ooze midway between a serpent and a fish.
I went through the male gender like a fire. I had their little rods
in my hand night and day, that's how I seem to remember it now. I was
five years olda Befere I was ten I seemed to have had every man
along the dazzling, stifling seaboard--the men having soft chubby
legs, and standing about three feet high. That could be imaginary.
I don't know what went before, in the primeval oaze stage, but it must
have been responsible for what came afterwards, namely my present physical
predicament, if it is that.
I could put it the other way rounde I could say I went 1ike a fire


through all the women. I'm vague on this point because my body is vague.
It isn't that I want to think about these things but that I have to face
the determining facts about my body. It is the deepest fact about me,
everything I say or do springs from it. So I canlt forget it. I can't
shake it off. It imprisons me. This fact is that I have an amphibian
sexa I don't like to bring it up. It shouldn't be the essential fact
about anyone, sex. Butabout me it is. You could say that at one and the
same time I have had all the possible aex in the world, and yet I have had
none. I want none. I would far rather rest. I don't want to do all
that tumbling, and then find out afterwards that I have tumbled into a
thicket. Women ravish me. This seems absurd when you think that I am
usually twice as broad as they are and so massive in the shoulders that
they like to touch my neck muscles. My voice is deeper than theirsr
I have a long stride, which they often call prowling. They turn and
look at me in concert halls. They've pever seen anything like me.
They know I'm a woman, and yet I am further advanced than a woman.
I am short of being a man and yet I'm more complete than a man because of
the woman in me. So I am a fascinating, vibrant whole. I'm at the end
of the road. I'm not someone who walks along with them--I'm the rest-
house at the end, however little rest they may get when they are once
inside. They fall in love with me endlessly, stupendously. And push
sex-
that onel fact about me into my face as fast as I'm trying to forget it.
But I can't forget it-my entire self. I really am unique. And they
phml
try to esretr the uniqueness. They want to know more. They are quite
intrigued to have a man and a woman on the best terms-in one person.
They adore the friend, pant after the lover. But sex is the joining of
two opposite parts, a complementary action. I have the opposite parts
Hair
in me. I am a whole. And in,sex they are trying to turn me into an
tag
opposite of themselves, so that togetheryf-she and I
make a
whole. And it won't work. I have to throw them off as hard as they


throw themselves on me. Nothing should be whole in life. It should
be struggling to realise the whole, but not be it itself. This means I
am dragged into people's struggles without the power to join in the struggles,
because I'm already whaole. This is_my conclusion, anyway, after half a
lifetime.
Somebody said to me once, Nothing about your body is a fact about
you. And I can see that. But I can't feel it. If I could feel that,
wonw
I really would be whole. But I can't keep my hands off thems I can't
resisteheir appeals. But it hurts me. It tears something in me. So
as fast as I try to throw off this deep facy about me I renew it. They
want to feel my stomach. Their eyes follow me round the rooma Some-
times I feel that they see me as a perfectly developed specimen of woman-
hood, deep-voiced, brimming over with
exciting suggestions
almost for a new biology-indeed what they themsertes might be were it
not for the weakening effect of that fatal male rod that, entering thenf,
selg-
lays their hopes low and delays
fruition. I look like a woman
whose development has received full concentration, to the point where a
new (but of course very ancient) biological combination is achieved.
I used to say that a new type of bi-sexed humanity would arise, based
on me. But that was opevado. It is exhausting always being different,
always standing out-night and day, waking and sleeping. People have
walked down the corridors of trains to see me, after hearing my voice.
Sometimes they become friends for life. I've been involved in fights.
I fought a priest once. I'vedeveloped a sort of physically bragging side.
I like people to see me shift great weights. The women follow me with
their shining eyes. I don't want to go on talking like this. I don't
want to plunge into thorny thickets just from thinking. It's bad enough
doing so from acting. It really is a terrible life. Then how do you
explain that when I wake in the maringi sing for joy? I sing at the
thought of not being attached!


I had to pause for a bit, to calm down. These women (and thoughts
about them) tear me from my wholeness. And yet I know Im not whole.
I'm not quite a world in myself. I feel the need to rush out and touch
someone-to know I'm here. I am enough of a world to exist without
people. But then I begin to feel that nothing exists except me. That
makes me need their touch. And once I see their faces, their-well,
I fall into the pit of thorns again and am faced once more with the deepest
primordial
fact about me, at night as at dawn, a prisoner in my' A - kan eccentricity.
What worries me is that if a man (it would bave to be one of that
hard analysing race) gave a clear anatomical description of my sexual parts
he would be saying the deepest thing about me that there is to be saide
I hate that this should be so. I don't believe it is so. But I behave
as if it were. I think I've explained this enough.
I wish there were no sex in the world. I would be the one suprememly
happy creature, or rather the one adequately developed creature, having the
elements of both sexes (and therefore neither) inside mes A world without
sex means that another form of creature has been found. Perhaps the power
of thought becomes so great that it actually brings into being the creature
Asexless wotld
it concentrates itself on. I ( F tht would make everywhere a home, every
table a place where you couldéit, becauss-since creation no longer took
place in the body-there would be no possessions any mores All the wars
I've been involved in were due
ThE to the existence of
couples. Either the man has warred against me or the womans Of course
I've always played my part. I concentrate on the men at first, at the
beginning of a new relationship. He feels he has a strange new friend in
me, and all the time his wife (unseen by him because he is concentrated on
me) is drinking me in, gorging her eyes on every movement I make. One
of them told me, It was aike a great golden tiger moving into the house.
It gave her a yearning to-
Again I want to point out that I am not


happy about this state of affairs. Ican't help what people say about
me. She felt she couldn't bear the clothes on her shoulders any more.
She wanted to bear everything off. Well, she did, at a later date,
and nearly tore my entrails out too. To put it in a thoroughly clear
way (the gruesomeness gives me pleasure), in an act of sex I ejaculate
my entrails.
I believe that evryone does, in some way.. God knows what they get
out of it. I can understand what women feel for me. But how they can
go/aspiring after the male rod, just to feel its mechanical shunting
action, I cannot imagine. Nor can I imagine what goes on betwean a man
and a woman. I've often asked. I simply do not see how she-the seed
inside her, the child-manufactury and the child-building breasts-can
need him. Well, of course, she needs him for the addition of his small,
mementeny pollen. But it seems such a trifle to give for a lifetime
spent cooking and coddling him! How dare these people call it marriage?
male
Now my approach to the woman is distinctly not that of a mane I wek in
with her. I know her thoughts, they are plain to me like a glittering
crown. I wonder how far you can recognise this crown if all you want
ker
to do is inject a shunting rod into thmm? Women have broken their
marriages for me, for the simple reason that they have felt themselves
appreciated for the first time. This always gave me a thrill. I mean
the word "thrill' exactly. It sent a shudder of triumph down my spine.
I felt I was clearing the world of impurity. I felt that displacing the
poor male rod was a self-justifying act. Of course other people said that
I had "broken' the marriage. You can't break anything that isn't break-
able.
I was thinking just now of Socrates when he talks to Phaedrus.
He explains that a lovely face is the divine appearing to us through the


senses. If the divine continued to come through the senses non-stop we
sould go mad---every mouthful, every breath divinel Love vouchsafes a
glimpse only of that original awful Face. We are fools if we go plundering
after that Face along the road of the senses but Awe dol I dol We see
one face and then look for another. Here is my pain, in one word. I get
everything through my senses. Somebody said to me once, There lies your
imprisonment. He meant that though God speaks to me He only speaks through
primerdiad
the senses. My primeval eccentricity (which is also my advanced state of
development) puts me close to God. People are always amazed at the extent
to which He looks after me. He gives me the things I dream. I don't
teve thmngs
pray for tihm iike other people. They simply recur in daydreams, of which
once
I am the rapt spectator. T/dreamt of a magnificently huge room with
a wall-to-wall fawn carpet - and he gave Me both. But this is the point.
He only gives through the senses. I see people through the senses-as
wrinkles on the face, as smiles, as rich, as poor. I don't feel their
presence without reference to what they look like and what they say.
Therefore I see them, know them, through the senses. Somebody once said
to me, I know people better with my eyes closed, my ears closed. But
I've never been able to experience that. This is why I say I am not
whole. God talks to me in daily terms. That He talks to me at all puts
me far beyond most of the people I come in contact with. But He won't
talk to me of all the hidden things, He won't tell me what power He has
put into that little rode Never a hint of what they share together.
The little rod and the warm tunnelled purse of delights!
oylen
So when women find me thes/find
their liberation
into the senses. Let me explain. It makes them feel that they have at
lasy achieved the freedom of their bodies, and that their most secret
wishes are delightfully within the span of realisation for the first time.
Even that isn't clear. I make them feel that their freedom lies in me,
in my company, while in themselves they aren's free at all. I am their


freedom. They feel understood and therefore whole for the first time.
And this excites them so deeply that they make the mistake of thinking that
Sometking
it is the preliminary of - dun physical, san M te WEIEAT
So I Aplay my part. They tear their clothes off at will. But what they
want is what I cannot give. And slowly they realsse that it was the chance
of freedom that excited them, rather than the chance of yet another rod.
They worry me, try to hurt me, they praise me, they hang round me for this
freedom which they feel I can endow them with. They say, With your eyes
on me, I am me ashever beforel A hundred women follow my progress round
the world like a map-route. When one of my stopping places lies near
their home they wait for the telephone to ring with quivering anguish.
Someone explained to me, Since they are bound by the senses too, and you
never satisfy them, they always need you. The mistake of the rod is
perhaps that it satisfies?
With some horroy I confess that the somebody who explains things to
me is a man.
In order to listen to him seriously I have to think of him as not
having a rod. I think of him as a woman without a bosome Indeed this
is how I see all men, quite naturally. I see them as weak because lack-
ing the divine child-manufactury inside. Someone said to me once, Do you
realise how you describe every husband of every friend you have as a weak
man? But there never was a strong onel You should hear the things women
tell mel How the man pleads, the tears cascading down his facel How
he always has that absurd little instrument at the ready! And you don't
call that weakness?
This was Sophia herself speaking. For days she has dictated this
kind of message to me-her doctrine of Sophian gender, you might call


ita It can go on endlessly, and the best thing I can do is to cut it
short and do some explaining as to who Sophia is. I have gleaned from
the other voices (mostly her friends or enemies) some sort of map of her
past life, and it is immediately obvious to me that her reminiscences con-
fuse past events, mix them together rather than really change them, so
that the Manhattan 'talmudic afternoons' are bound up for ever, and quite
falsely, in her mind, with the Harlem heresies'. Yet a certain truth
about Sophia, and her friends, emerges. Nor is she alone in confusing
past events. "Aaron's' wife does the same. But here again a certain
truth, about her, is established, truer perhaps than any actual event
would be. The actual event is of small importance. All these people,
with the exception of the so-called Renegade, Ba after revelation of some
kinds this became immediately clear to me too. They distrust the ob-
lin
jects they live surrounded by. They disbelieve not simply/their permanence
but their logic. They see objects as they see past events-as the
movable (and disappearable) furniture of destiny. And when they reminisce
they confuse the events and the objects with what seems like whim, though
in fact they are discovering themselves through these apparent 'mistakes'.
'I and *you' and 'it' and 'past' and 'present' become merged in some-
thing dream-like that is actually more the reality for them than anything
logical. Sophia tells us that her mother was a peasant woman, her father
a painter and 'a prince among men'. Well, in so far as I can ascertain
it, and in so far as I am not changing the facts for MY destonys she was
an orphan childe The beach she often refers to, where she fascinated the
yar)
children of her age (about five), was actually a stretch of coast below
Barcelona where the convent she grew up in had its annual summer 'colony'.
The children were trooped down to the sea by one of the nuns at ten o'clock
each morning, and they returned to their barrack-like quarters at noon,
to wait until two or three in the afternoon for their lunch, according


to Spanish custom. She never knew her parents. She went to three
ewery ove 2 Kan,
convents in all, creating havoc inj = atite, until she was politely but
firmly sent
into the world at the age of eighteen. And here the
"Sophian map' or the "Sophian map of love', as her friends call it,
startede She travelled round the world, furiously, unquenchably.
She made friends eberywhere from Saigon to Montreal, and at a smacking
pace. She never ceased making them for a day, an hour-on trains,
in subways, swimming across gulfs, even driving alone along highways
at a hundred miles an hour between one state and another.
She missed something, after the convent. Her most prized possess-
ion has always been a tiny pieta in bronze, cast from a bozzetto of clay
in Cosimo de' Medici's collection. She keeps it hidden aways and I
believe she prays to it. In all the bustle of her life, the late nights
and the changed jobs, the flights and desert treks and the love-adventures
where the husband went after her with a stick or a gun, she felt no bustle,
even little involvement. A certain place in her was always silent and
still, and expectant.
her
Really and truly she felt Christ himself had thrown/out of the convent.
Achally
it KRer
k $he was never thrown out,but this was how she felty It added to her resent-
ment of men, or perhaps it derived from it. Anyways she had a sense of
being utterly abandoned. Even when she had plenty of money to spend
(she never found money-making difficult) this feeling of being an outcast
from creation persisted in her. She was fascinated by convents. She
would talk for hours with anyone of convent schooling. She would look
at nuns with a sort of fervent envy. She had nothing of the nun about
her of course. But whenever she passed the convent attached to the hospital
(an the island where she finally settled) she would stop and gaze ups this
was before it opened its gates
to hery and she was a deliriously


excited visitor every day for-well, as long as a single experience
ever lasted with her, about three weeks.
The first important place on the 'Sophian map', where her destiny
began to take shape, was of course New York. Now her New York period
she confuses utterly. It consisted in fact of two sections. The first
was in Harlem, or rather on its edge, where the brownstone slum trails
off into Columbia university. Her friends there-one could say her
adopted parents, though they were almost certainly younger than herself
(she was now just past thirty)--were Mabel Hale, who worked all night in
a bakery, and seems to have had a fascination for stone pestles, and Hack
her husband, who as far as I can gather had something to do with Coplumbia
university. Mabel and Jack were, still are no doubt, black. They need
not have lived in Harlem. It was a choice of conscience. He was a
teacher, perhaps an art dealer-I can't establish which. He and his wife
felt they should livebmong 'our people'. This was some years before
ter
black militancy had taken hold of the city, or rather thet part of the
city. Sophia had a room two floors above theme In her memortes-
and Aaron's wife in the most astonishing way corroborates the errorl-
Jeurih
she gets these facts confused with her later friendship with the/professor
-(aronjand his wife, in Manhattan. That was simply a friendship.
Aaron was a book antiquarian. He and his wife sat for hours with Sophia rip.
talking the Talmud, sometimes with a rabbi present too. There was a
question of Sophia 'becoming a Jew'. Now this she has confused with
the earlier Harlem period. And she has confused (desire had a shaping
hand here, I suppose) Mabel Hale, the drowsily smiling girl from the
south, the red of her lips and the startling white of her teeth in ex-
wrhoce
citing contrast with the black of her skin,
pores. shones out
and
-rilal
so clearly on the hot days EE
her plump, rose/t tauch cheeks,
with a quite opposite kind of


creature (but memory takes no account of opposites), namely 'the slim
one', as Sophia calls her, the wife of Aaron, who never so much as
breathed an informal sentence to her in all her lifel
Nor was there ever a question of Sophia putting wooden spangles,
much less jewellery, on Mrs Aaron's naked body. Whether there was a
hidden and entirely unenunciated love between them I cannot say. They
both say there was. But again, memory here is shaped by present desire.
We can make anything we like out of the past. Already in the act of
memory lies desire, before we get to work on it. Its picture thus
is much more of the present than the past. For we shape 'past' events
according to the needs of our roving destiny.
This whole question of destiny has been overlooked for centuries
in the west. We are rendered by this loss spectators of a jumble of
happenings which end suddenly and unreasonably with death, having begun
as suddenly and unreasonably with birth. We have twisted 'destiny' to
mean *what the future will unfold', namely the prison of events that
grows up round us, compelling us to this action or that. But our
destiny is an active choosing, and this choosing we exercise first and
foremost in memory. For this reason it is not too important that
people here confuse events, and make accusations that simply do not
apply.
The talk below about Sophia being 'one of us', 'one of our race'
came not from Aaron or his wife, as she claims, but from the Hale couple.
Sophia looked negro to them, she 'thought and behaved negro'. I can
believe this. Sophia is one of those universal creatures Indians,
Arabs, Aztecs seize on as one of themselves. Now the long discussions
she had with Aaron and his wife were of quite a different or'der from
the rollicking ones, laced with laughter and loud kisses, that she had


with Jack and Mabel. With the Aarons, being older, she was naerer the
religious quest that dominated her life and entered all her loves like
ing
the Song of Solomon, Aquiver/with worship.
Perhaps Aaron and his wifetrecognised the Jew in me', as she says.
It doesn't seem likely. They are a quiet couple, and he is perhaps
too orthodox to try to make converts. But what Sophia does with her
memory is to put spangles on Aaron's wife, and transfer the damp heat
pf the Hale apartment in Harlem Eto the air-conditioned Aaron apart-
ment in Manhattan! And she transmutes a lot of half-kidding talk about
her being a negress into talk about 'the race in exile'. A story comes
about, then, which never happened, but which fully realises the desires
of those who say it did happen! Destinies take shape by sweeping the
material of past events into a whole that begins to alter present events!
And the degree to which we alter the past equals the degree to which we
mean present events to be influenced by. thema Thus, wonder of wonders,
Aaron's wife corroborates Sophia's false story, and willingly receives
the spangles on her naked bodyl Not only this but (much later in the
book) she plants some very dangerous dog-pills at her husband's bedside
in the island hospital in the mad hope that he will take them (and he
does). Now she hashothing against her husband. She has always, as
far as appearances go, been a faithful wife. They have had children
most successfully, unlike the Renegade. But she--and even Aaronl-
will say later that she had affairs with gentiles before her marriage.
Of course it is not 'true'. Her thoughts, and his thoughts, offer
ta Thouglts
quite a different picture from the 'truth'. Indeed, it is from them
alone that the perisous situation of the dog-pills arises. They both
'use' Sophia in these thoughts, castigating her for what she did not do
or think (for she did it and thought it with Jack and Mabel, not them!),


and Sophia pn her side sends shafts of flaming resentment across the
two or three kilometres between her villa and theirs because they
'isolated' her from her friends in New York (she was "isolated' with
the Halesl) and turned her hair grey with 'glanced accusations' which
denounced her as deceitful or out for self-gain. As she rightly says
whenever she mentions this imaginary situation, 'it was really I myself
who did the accusing, I was under the most acute self-examination of my
life'. There lies the point! We need all these 'past' events, real
or modified or transposed, to bring ourselves into clearer focusl It
doesn't matter to Sophia whether the Aarons really did accuse her.
It doesn't really matter if she imagined the whole damned lot! The
point is that the accusations are necessary for her development, through
arduous self-examination, and that 'real events' and 'real people' and
'our real selves' are simply thoughts that we are choosing and which,
no less, once formed, are choosing us.
It is the Mother Superior of the island-convent who puts this most
clearly, as we shall see. For this reason she is able to acpieve for
sorpia her release back into convent-life, so to speak, her acceptancef
again not so much by the Church as the holy spirit itself. Sophia's
happiness after her first visits to the convent, and the Mother Superior's
first visit to her, are described at the end of this book. Yet they had
never met before. It is clear that their destinies seized hold of the
dog-pill scandal at the hospital to make it all possible. I think they
would both say (the Mother Superior would actually say it and Sophia
would nod ardently) that anyone unaware of a destiny shaping his life
is a poor devil indeede They would say that he therelry misses the
chance of creating events.
Another points the thoughts spoken here are not meant for other


people by the speakers. They are not even quite waking thoughts.
Those who speak them are in a state of daydream, sometimes actual dream,
even deep sleep. For these thoughts are not expressed in words at all.
They are not conclusive, in this sense. They are felt or projected, on
an inchoate level usually, and they reach words only through me. The
speakers might be surprised to hear their thoughts repeated back to
them! This is because, while the thoughts, however inchoate, emerge
from their minds, they are not rational in the sense of abiding by a
space-time formula. Thus, Aaron's wife should not be thought to feel
secret love towards Sophia just because she says she does. She, the
present Aaron's wife, feels a stirring interest, lost in deep Horivate
regions of sleep and dream, far below conclusive space-time thoughts,
towards the past Sophia whom she knew on a number of formal occasions
in New York and whom after all, she has over the years formed into an
image, delectable or dark or dangerous, according to the needs of her
(Mrs Aamon's) destiny. If told that she, in her waking space-
time self, is attracted to the present Sophia she might laugh. One


glance at the present Sophia, in the flesh, might dispel in a moment
all her Sophia-oriented thoughts, just as actually seeing Sophia in his
lounge one morningh for the first time in five or seven years, suddenly
dispels Aarons hatred of her, which he has been quietly building up.
That is, the Aaron destinies no longer require her destiny to hover in
their orbit.
No, these thoughts are not in the order of rational statement:
that is not the language of feelings anyway. But no more are they
irrational, much less unconscious! Everything we know comes through the
mind, even dreams, but we must not expect the mind to apply its rationalist
namel
machinery (the forming of impressions into objects, t
thoughts EaT
lig
enact an 'objective world") at all times and to all thingse These
thoughts, I mean those on the inchoate level, are in the nature of re-
hearsals for action, or rehearsals for new departures in feeling, new
self-liberations. The actual finished performance (for the actors the
work has all been done, and a certain routine sets in) lies in the
'objective thoughts that may or may not result, namely in events
'outside (which irtum need not be physical in order to be considered
abjective, but simply strong and speakable feeling).
Turning everything into words, in our acutely literary civilisation,
has accustomed us to false accounts of people's 'feelings' as if these
were always in a ready space-time forme It isn't that we need a dreame
language, to cope with that lower order of thought. The result would be
even more literary. No, wef just have to recognise that what is going
on in the cauldron of the mind is pilotted by destiny in a much larger
ttat wotd
meaning than the Christian cartoltionfation. Violent aspirations
rage and throw up the images they require, joining or dividing or trans-
posing, or even re-imagining, past events (already kneaded to a definite
shape by the mind perceiving them at the timel) into the material that
only et the end, one might say at the superficial end, comes to words


and actual happenings. It is no use trying to devise a lanquage for
those raging and experimental bacchanalia of the mind, those rehearsals
where
anly
so much is improvised, because language is aleay a space-
time service for the clarfafication of objects, 4 formed Houghts.
Of course some people here-Cassandra and the Renegade, for instance-
choose the old form of 'objective' narrative for their thoughts, that is
lo te sxpresse
even in a state of half-dream they do not allow thoughts theis
until they have reached some order of cogency. In Cassandra's case this
arises from deep class-discipline (her 'imperial' side, she would say),
so that even her dreams talk = = like Macaulay. In the case of the
Renegade we have a mind in such a chronic state of chaos, unable to retain
past events or dreams or even the space-time formulae to which he for dear
life clings, as to make it difficult for a clear destiny to take shape at
all. His perhaps is the biggest fight of all. He clings to the
'reasonable' way of talking because he believes that this is the way
the mind talks when in its proper function. His inchoate desires,
his nightmares, his lusts are all, for him, in an area of the sick and
rejectable, a simple hindrance to life. In other words, Cassandra
and the Renegade are, of all the people 'talking* here, the children
of the nineteenth century, par excellence.
To get back to the storys Sophia, at the height of her friendship
with the Aarons, left New York on one of her many routine business trips
to Europe. She called in at Tangiers to see an old friends this is
"Cassandra', By the way, no one 'talking* here likes to use his or her
name except Sophia herself, who feels a Sma
ancient enough to
deserve that names the others feel that their 'real'names are not real
enough to describe theme So we have to pick our way rather unsatisfact-
orily through Renegades and Aarons and Madison Avenue Hairdressers. Now in
Tangiers
Cassandra suggests to Sophia that she should builtf herself a villa
'somewhere close by'. Having lived the greater part of her life in


Arab fountries, Cassandra is by now intoxicated to the blood with those
a velvet-black nights,
and the bitter-sweet shrill
Oke Aral
noisesh and
fierce haunting aromas. She thinks Spanish Morrocco
athe
might be suitable for Sophia, or maybe 'a place outside Beirut'.
Sophia nodded and bit her lip, and chose instead a Mediterranean island
sufficiently close to Italy to have been owned for a time by the Queen
of the Adriatic, and by the Greeks before them, and not so far from
Islam as to lack what Cassandra calls 'a certain bite'. That is why
Sophia took the Aarons with her on her next trip. He needed a place
in the sun, for his healthe They saw the island, bought a plot of
lands A few weeks later Cassandra (who had actually lived on the island
some years before) bought a plot of land two or three kilometres down the
coast: it's for you, she told Sophia. And for you, Sophia replied.
So they set up house together. As for the quarrel that then began
to divide the Aarons from Sophia, it never happened, though it seems
devoutly to have been wished not only by the parties concerned by all
their friends tool What did happen was that they saw less and less of
each other. The Aarons may have been critical of Sophia as a kind of
biological troublemaker. I mean they may have heard of her adventures.
Perhaps. And there was an episode involving the Renegade which caused
Sophia to feel resentment towards them. This was early days on the
island, before Sophia's place was built. And it seems actaully to have
But
happened. pid Aaron's wife ask her not to let the Renegade into the
house as a joke? Anyway Sophia, who could be strangely without humour
sometimes, took it seriously, and refused him entrance. The Aarons,
being orthodos, were critical of the Renegade with his silver-knobbed
cane. They invented t nickname. No great personal insult was in-
volveds He was simply a lapsed Jew in their eyes.
This episode became a characteristically "Sophian' one She used
it for her destiny for all she was worth. And from this time she saw


the Aarons less and less. A new set of events was taking shape in
her, of which the Aarons now began to play a formative part as the silent
and imagined (or rather created) accusers. It must have astonished
Aaron, to say the least, to see Sophia stride into his house after an
absence of at least five years and hear her screaming abuse
account of his (perfectly 'created'l) maltreatment of a Sister Mahatma
of whom he had never heard and who in any case had lived behind the convent-
Rad
enclosure ever since she/travelled from Bombay ten or twelve years beforel
But her destiny needed Sister Mahatma at this time, too.
any mote
And Mabel and Jack Hale, why don't they figure/in this destiny?
Have they long ago been 'absorbed'? Sophia never mentions them, and,
Tris
I swear, will never mention them as long as she lives. a is on the
nitker
self- censershit
fov molance, 2 * fact
level/e other/
that she grew up in A convent? an felt n
violent sense of having been
torn from the holy spirit al
Heret at the age of eighteen. Deep down she believes that
her 'unusual sins' accounted for that rypture, her "biological' sins.
Now her silence about all these things means not shame but reverence.
Also,
she
Aret she cannot find a use for what/ has Ea put safely into a little
nolkng
temple at the back of her mind. Mabel and Jack are/mo less than
forker.
sacred/ She will never see them again, probably. They are embalmed,
and
future,
monumentally, in her past, pmefant, a good omen for her plunge so
positive indeed that she fears to upset their golden spell on her life
by actually naming theme Let me explain. Giving such perfection
actual names would seem to her to reduce the experience of their love,
which must now remain a state of being inside her, beyond naming,
and much more even than a memory. Even the memory of being sent from the
convent is not painful to her so much as simply a state of being now,
al hunger which spurs her silently from day to day to 'return' to


which
where she belongs, t the arms of that spirit tt sent her out into
the world to 'shed' her sins. She will never mention this quest,
since it is only known to her, so to speaky in the pores of her skin.
It is almost the condition of her being alive. And I only know this
has
to be the case because it/transpired to me slowly inthe course of her
searching narratives. We are all perhaps moved by these silent quests,
of which the 'rational' world we have constructed over the last few
centuries makes a hopeless mess, because it is obliged, by its limited
cosmology, to describe us in terms of the work we do or the money we
earn or even our habits of dress.
The free will in destiny is not after all in the mind, which chooses
money and work and dress, fortune good or bad, order or havoc. The
real free will operates only through the mind, and towards objectives
beyond the minde Eas The mind-cosmology cannot adequately explain
tis prreess,
The following is Sophia's description of that afternoon episode
involving the Renegade, at the Aaron villa. E It harks back five,
maybe seven years. She was staying with the Aarons while her own house
was in construction.
Once, at an island-villa near my own, I gazed through the Moorish
arches of the verandah at a path that curled round the valley below,
and saw a man walking slowly up, a cane in his hande Something glittered.
I realised later that this was the cane's silver knob. He used the cane


as a switch now and then, making leisurely dabs at the burned grass on
either side. It looked like the first garden of the world. The sun-
light was painted on it, and you couldn't imagine it leaving- deep mellow
gold that made the oleander bushes look like bunches of iron spikes support-
ing flames, and the mimosa, blooming late, became specks of dusty yellow
light that had found a way of becoming permanent. I knew who the. man was.
I turned to her and said (it doesn't matter about her name, because the
biological recurrence of her kind is infinite, and she was no exception
to dozens of other wives I knew), He's coming up the hill, your neighbour.
You would have thought I'd thrown a wet dishcloth at her. She jumped out
of her chair and shouted, What? How does he dare? It didn't strike me
as strange, a neighbour walking up a sun-painted hill about drinks-time,
to exhahange island-smiles and then go down to his banker's boredom again.
We'd strolled down to his place enough times. He was a small furry man
with thick black hair and/hoaked nosee You wanted to hug all eight stone
of him, then throw him in a corner to sit on later, when your feet were
tired. The pores of Ahis skin breathed intimations of debit and credit
columns. His mellow, friendly eyes blazed with gold at the edges.
He reminded me of the national game park in Kenya; eyes like his were bred
by many years of basking in the sun and eating other creatures alive.
She said, If you're nice to him I'll never speak to you again! I turned
round to face her in a certain innocently enquiring way I have, which puts
a husky boyishness into my voice, and asked, Why? Why? And the answer
came as final and closed as the covenant itself, Because he's a renegade
Jew!
I accepted that. After all, she was a Jew. Her father never looked
up when you entered the rooma All his life he had his head turned modest-
ly away. He never once looked me in the eyes. There was supposed to be
something religious about that, I mean I could have felt angry about it


but the fact that he really had passed beyond the body, clearly so,
quenched all the fire in me. He was a real Jews I couldn't call his
daughter that. ((This is an example of where Sophia confuses Aaron's
wife with Mabel. As Cassandra will say later, Mabel's husband always
ribbed her (Mabel) over her lack of "black self-identifcation'. This
Sophia too, always impressed by strong male arguments if not by the male
Mabel's,
himself, thought a weakness of herss Mabel's heresy was Black and white
totling
is ell the seme to me', with an easy tuga laugh! She would say to Sophia
when they were alone together, It's only the men want to make all this
black-and-white trouble.)) She went to the synagogue with her husbande
Every day I heard Aaron praying on the verandah. He said to me once,
I feel so close to you-and you're so complete-and there's something
so ancient about you-are you sure you aren't Jewish? I know you arel
I feel itl ((This sounds very like Jack Hale. He was a tall, slim,
moustached Bostonian, more Indian than negro to look at, with trts
earnest way of talking, Here Sophia transmutes what he seid into Aaron's
mouth with the most telling effect.))
So when she called their neighbour a renegede Jew I thought there
must be something in it. He came nearer the house, step by unconcerned
step. She said, sitting back in her wicker chair, her skirts up to
her hips (I swear she tantalised her son this way, there was no limit to
her carnal inventions), And you can answer the door, I'm not going tol
((Another obvious reference to Mabel, who, being safely embalmed as
own
perfect, in jjthe past, must not be allowed hery carnality, so it has to
be transposed to the undemonstrative wife of Aeroni)) She was a slim
little thing (Aeron's wife). One of her appeals for me was that she was
so like a boy. Naked she was as amooth as a sucking pig ((Mabel, again!))
And she sat there refusing to stir. What could I refuse to those clear
round breasts, uplifted like a girl's? Her voice was as slim as she


was. It in'sinuated its way across the verandah, slipped into your
brain before you had heard it, almost. Her eyes were slim. Her
commands were slime They left no room to be disobeyed.
When his knock came I walked down the travertine stairs like a
servant (Miranda was out), setting a frown on my face for all I was worbh.
A frown puckers up my eyes in a pained ways without giving the slightest
impression of thought. It points my eyes with disapproval (not
coldly but predatiously), and when I opened the door he got this ancient
dart straight between his mild gold-rimmed eyes, the poor renegade jackal.
He began to smile but then his eyes faltered and fluttered and his mouth
drooped. I was bursting with pity. I wanted to throw my arms round hip
and shout, Darling, do come inl But my opening stage-business had para-
lysed me as well as hime Then to my astonishment he became quite un-
paralysed. And do you know what I found? She was standing behind mel
She was smiling her slimmest, most charming smile towards himl And he
was already advancing into the hall, almost brushing past mea He took
a couple of drinks with us on the verandah and reserved all his speech
for her, giving me an aoccasional fluttering glance. I do believe she
enjoyed itt She glanced and glittered at hime And I movefabout in my
wicker chair like a vast boy who had made a gaffe, in a continual uproar of
cracking straw like a wagon on its way to market. And then he went his way
down the hill again, while the sun began to steal its mellow colours away
and artfully plant night by quick degrees.
As I walked down that hill with my silver-topped cane slung under
my arm I had reason to smart. Without the slightest provocation, having
hitherto received only smiles from that big fat lesbian cow, and hugs,
and shouted derlings (I never like these effusive openings, they always
play one false), she almost shuts the door in my facel There's a goy
for youl Yest If it hadn't been for her, I mean the other one, slim


and graceful in her chairs a Jewess, I might have passed a very embarrassing lal
half-hour indeed! As it was, I was rescued by one of my own race. I
goyf
suppose that underneath, really and truly deep underneath, they feel a
disdain of us, a racial disdain they are not,tm however, deep enough
to understand and extirpate. My God, that disdain has led me an inner
can
dance of death indeed! They murdered my neice in a contration camp.
And look what wars they*ve brought on mankind! I'm/not véry eloquent.
alrout
I wish I was. I could talk/how they sacked even their own churches in
their so-called crusades against the infidel, they tore down their own
Virgin! They attacked the Greek empire solely for the booty and the
colonial outposts. Yes, I was reading that. I always thought there
was something valiant about it-a holy war on Islam-until I read that.
They went under the symbol of the Cross and they were far more murderous
e cross
than the Romans who had invented it. Yes, the Romans invented/ E as a
mean style of execution-for petty thieves and so one I read that
too.
Anyway, crusades aside, here are the facts. I have a nap after
lunch and write three or four letters to the office, routine business
stuff that can risk delay. I decide on a walk up the hill and I pick up


my silver-knabbed cane. Silver makes it heavy but I like it. If
you caught anybody a blow on the head with that you'd do some damage.
Likewise I keep a scimitar by my bed. I picked it up in a sidestreet in
Jerusalem, or pergaps it was Jaffa. You never know. Money produces
friends and it produces enemies. But to get back to the walk up the hill,
I decided to go and see our new friends, three of them living together in
an exotic ménage if ever there was one, She as slim as a boy, her legs as
near to being perfect female legs as I've seen. And then her husband-
bearded,
bushy-haired, his shoulders fat and broad, slightly hunched, and the sharp
jet-black eyes of a man looking out for trouble because trouble has been
pushed his way as it has been pushed minel Yes! And then, the frequent
Sophia.
guest, My goodness. A furry animal! She reminds me of the national
game park in Kenya. But you couldn't say precisely what animal. Nor
would you say she was a woman. Or a mane She is a third creature!
Gave me a kiss the second time we met, a smack on the cheek that put me in
mind of voluptuous nights-of the kind I have dreamed about but never ex-
perienced, My goodness. Strides about the room devouring you with attent-
sew
ion-eyes that scrutinise you anew with every glance, as if they see some
fthing different in you each time. And her voice, like a tenor. I cank
hear herbinging sometimes from my bathroom. That piece of Othello's where
he's retiring to bed with Desdemona- -something about the dense night and
every clamour being extinguished. Her voice drifts down the hill as if-
a yy
well, Joperas and concerts no longer took place in public halls but in the
heart. It makes me-not embarrasseds it halts me. Sometimes I could
cry. We have a sad destiny. I've done generous things for people and
then had to withdraw my hand quick before it was bitten off. Sadness lies
in those jet-black bitter eyes of my neighbour too. I wonder what he thinks
of me. He never seems to be in when I call. I heard he goes to the
synagogue and if his daughter walks out with a goy he throws a blue fit.
I'd like to see my sons' faces if I told them not to generate with


gentiles! You have to bear crosses in this life. As a matter of fact
knowing this brought me to an understanding of that lonely Jew who long
ago bore that cross of wood on his shoulders.
And if he thinks I've sold up anything he can go fry his
face. My sons-in-laws are all goys. Well, all ka 2 kkam.
Angwes,
# I stood placidly knocking on the door, looking back at the first
garden of the world (or so it seemed), with the last of the sun painting
the Bypresses such a colour that you thought it could never be wiped off,
when suddenlythe is standing there before me with her eyes puckered up
like a faun's. I swear she had pointed ears and a couple of hoofs for a
moment! I smiled a hullo but there was no change: no doubt that the faun-
scrutiny was intended for me. My heart made a jump! The same look that
onhong lalondl
a country clup secrekaryi had given me years og The look they must have
given us when they handed out stars of David in the streets of Munich,
Krakow, Amsterdam! The look they had when they closed the oven doors with
No, I couldn't bear that this destiny should follow me here, in
this fertile haven cradled in the seal But then I saw her face. She
was standing behind the faun. So slim, so collected, with that special
composure our people have when they are at their best (namely, when they
are left untroubled). I almost pushed the faun aside. I made myself
enjoy those highballs. It was a sad half-hour. 'Sad destiny' kept ringing
in my ears. But as I looked across at the slim/and a Moorish song drifted
up from the sweltering balley, it seemed to me thatsome agreament about this
destiny passed between our eyes. She saw and understood what I felt.
And the faun shifted her great backside about so much in her wicker chair
that I thought we were in a packing factory.
Those are simply the facts. A Jew knocks on a door and a goy turns
a black frown on him while another Jew draws him in a with a welcoming smile.
There is no disputing that. It isn't a matter of opinion. I would like K


think a lot of things. But these are the facts. I would like to
believe that Socrates, in talking to Phaedrus as he did, was being
highly spiritual. Whereas he simply wanted a boy.
At this point I feel I must interrupt, having said nothing so far.
Sophia has called me 'slim', all but a boy, and implied that I am the
serpent while she is the eapole holding me in her claws, as my husband once
showed me on an Egyptian tomb, the eagle meaning spirit and the serpent
sex. I really believe she thinks me a sexual machine, and I know, as
true as I sit here gazing across what really does seem the first garden
ever conceived, that she thinks I wear open skirts in the house to trap
my eldest son, whose pencil doodlings consist entirely of the female
bosome ((I cannot decipher this. Aaron's wife has two sons, both
married with children of their owne Mabel on the other hand did have
a son--little more than ten years old when Sophia knew them. And
Mabel did try to trap him, in a household game that made Sophia bend
over double wth laughter (Cassandra). Mabel would make straight for
the child's genitals, then, drawing her hand away, show her thumb pushed
between her forefinger and middle finger, Tkd H
as if she had just stolen his little manhoode This transference to
who was
Aaron's wife,l so much the opposite in her approach to her children,
gives Sophia perhape a forbidden pleasurq.)) A peculiar puckered
look comes across her brow when she feels that I want to trap her too.
((So Sophia's transference suits her, or it suits her to claim that it
suits herl)) But didn't she trap me? take them in her hands one morn
ing in the Manhattan apartment and say they were like the first ones of
creation when the girl was just emerging from the boy (she has a theory
about that)? But this fear of E hers of my wanting to trap her, how
ever simulated it may be, brings out the trapping impulse in me, and I
am suddenly in an ecstasy of pleasure at having this furrys prowling,


big-bellied beast among us, like the stranger that came to Abraham's
tent and Abraham knew it was God. That was how she appeared to me.
She came into our 'cave'. She calls it a cave, wherever we live
((quite imaginary, this)). She said to me one day, Why don't you let
the light in? It's so dark! You live in darkness! ((It is difficult
to imagine their formal relationship leading to this kind of intimate
dressing-down. I feel that Aaron's wife here needs this statement to
be made about the way she lives, or used in New Yark to live. She
needs the Sophina witness to help bring a changing light into her world))
And, truly, sometimes I think of myself as a creature of darkness.
When the Queen of the Night sings from the sky I am always giddy with the
thought that it is me singing, even that I was exercising myself in
ke muse
Mozart's mind when he wrote #/down! The Queen plays a vague and con-
tradictory part in the opera-he could easily have left her out, but
I believe I was present to him, I bouched his writing hand. And in
fact I sleep in the days wake at night, because the silence of the night
is fearfully noisy to me, I am so alive to its spirits and vibrations!
Can you imagine that? Whatpreature could be more night-arientated
than that? ((This question has a fairy-tale lift of the voice, because
the whole thing about waking at night is a fairy-tale. Here she has
done a neat trasference toa Mabel Hale, who really did wake at night,
to wark at her bakery two blocks deeper into Harlem! As far as I
can tell the Aarons never kept a late night if they could help it.))
He too has called me slim, my legs the most perfectly female legs
he has seen. I mean the renegade Jew, with his silver-knobbed cane,
strolling up the hill to take our drinks when he has insulted us by
Yes!
sitting us at the bottom of his dining tablel A He showed his preference
for the gentiles there. My husband really discorged himself when we
walked back home that night, he ejected violent gushes of indignation,


screaming almost triumphantly that he had been seated 'down-table'
as he called it. A much younger man, a goy of course, and a member
ofmy husband's profession, was seated next to the hostess! But my
husband knew and I knew that it was their furniture that stuck in our
throatslo The renegade expresses himself in furniture! First there is
too much of it, and then it all shines, the glass and the marble and the
polished tiles and the abstract 'shit-and-drip' paintings as my husband
calls them, not a cushion or even a wooden surface let alone books, ewerghtong
it is
squealyat you, and we know the message thay-are squealing,
that someone has fallen from the divine secret! From a gentile you
expect bright boxes of tricksy accessories, like the sculpture that
groans and squirts water, they know no better and deserve no better,
but here was a man in whom a secret burned and he had let the flame
go outi How my husband yelled, his voice echoing across the lovely
Renegade
night. One doesn't expect to see the r at the synagogue (which
admittedly is three hundred miles away across a stretch of water)
but one does expect him to # make a synagogue of his own homel Yes,
one is harder on the renegade than on the enemy.
And if I am slim, if I am all but perfect in my legs, it is because
I have been adorede A man like my husband doesn't come and put brace-
lie
lets and wooden necklaces and spangles on me as I kay naked for nothing.
((Another, perhaps wistful, transference from Jack and Mabel Hale.
Aarand
Sophia certainly introduced her A A to them. I believe they)e went
several times to
Harlem apartment. But
beTemE are as silent
thetp
they
on the negro couple as Sophia is.)) Again and again I have heard from
my husband that clothes do me harmi The only other one who ever echoed
that was Sophiae We gave her everything we hade She could walk into our
bedroom whenever she wished. If anyone had told us before she came
that a gentile would one day be entering our bedroom at will we would


have laughed! My father, who will never raise his eyes to look at a
stranger, would have burst into tears. Not that I am like my father, or
my husband. I spend little time thinking, much less praying. To be the
wife of a praying man is enough perhaps. But I do believe what she said
once, in our bedroom as a matter of fact, sitting on my bed, that we Jews
hold objects sacred, an air of aacredness hangs round our furniture, it
makes the smallest spangle placed on me heavy with meaning beyond itself,
while the gentile moves in a world of objects which are dead and meaningless
to him, except in their function of being leaned on or eaten out of or
wasked in, without the smallest touch of the divine. That is the difference
between their homes and ourse There is why my husband disgorged his
fury after being in the renegade's home and finding simply objects that
made grotesque squealing noises and not A single thing prayed about or
prayed for or prayed in frott of. How has the Race survived? In the
throb of the air in a Jewish home-nothing spoken, nothing seenl An
empire that required no outposts, a temple requiring no walls! Therefore
a renegade Jew is one who has wilfully destroyed the Race, by not being alive
to the throbt However much gold he may send to Israel, however much the
names of Wagner and Richard Strauss and Nietsche may make the blood boil in
his head, he has murdered the Race no less than the blackest exterminatori
For the Jew inme (I didn't always realise this, I had a child by a
gentile once) you have to look further than my slimness or even my perfect
((Neadlers K say, The Aever did Kave a child 4y a gentils).
legs. / I am reminded of the Marschallin in Die Rosenkavalier: she gets
up in the middle of the night and stops all the clocks in the house because
she cannot bear the racing of time, which is louder at night because the
day's camouglages are absent! The Marsofhilin in me comes not from a
noble Viennese house but from the daughters of Shem, and I stop the clocks
to hear the silence of the desert of Mesha, where time never was! But
above that desert-silence is the racing of my thoughts. She said I am


all serpent. All body, all sexe And I said to her once, Yes, sex is all
I think about. And she realised, from my eyes, that I meant her to under-
what that
stand something quite different from/cutting gentile ward, (which almost
Conld ever
rhymes with 'axs')/oen denote. I left her to get my meaning, but I don't
think she ever dide I am saying this in the middle of the night, so that
my thoughts follow each other without apparent eonnection, but there is a
mesmeric connection deeper and more important than any daytime, bleak logic
(of pentile manufacture can datcover. Sex is racial passion! What the
daughters of Lot did was simply incest in gentile eyes. These two girls
said to each other, Since there are no young men available to give us
children, we will have to go in and lie with our father, so that his seed
will not be losti Sex is recognition o the seed! I keep the seed alive
in my sex, my bodyl When my husband puts spangles round me he is far beyand
caldqulating a mean spasm of pleasure for himself, which is gentile sex.
He is perpetuating the seed! adoring the seed! The seed, the act utself,
the spangles and the yards of broaader, the silks and damasks, all one and
the same thing! The poor gentile drops into his snoring bed and if his
hardness happens to correspond with her softness, well then, a conjugation
takes place which gives him pleasure and her pleasure, like a bottle of
wine or a good evacuation, and that is the end of it, they turn over and
snore again, and if in the course of the next few months a child appears,
why, that is an event which has little or no connection with the firsto
But we in the same act are entering deep into the past, the night, the
future, we reaogn the desert of Mesha, we glow, we hear the voices of
forbears, the history of our Race unfolds with forbidden wonder in our
blood, we see all that was done from the building of the house of God in
Jerusalem with Nebuchadnezzar's vessels of gold and silver, to the buioking
of this other temple on an island hilit always think of Mesha as desert,
for the silence that this word denotes for me, but in fact it was the land


of milk and honey and wild fruitrulness! I understand and love my
husband when he shows a sudden frozen horror on hearing that our daughter
is walking out with a gentile. It means she will let the fruit die inside
herl I knowg because I did it myself But when you unite yourself to
your proper seed again, when you go in to the Jew, the eir is pure, the
fruit is alive again! She wouldeven do better to steal across the terrace
and go into him U her own father, and let him believe it was me, just to
keep his seed! I am bold enough to say that I hope my son will come tn
to me before he comes into a gentile. I am bold end mad enough to say
thatt
For a whore is a deep ditch, and a strange woman is a narrow pit.
Who spoke?
This is how I began to see sex in everything, because sex meant the
seed end the propagation thereof. The seed is the night-silence, the
sun-glompr the day, the fragrance of a girl before she is merried! If
Freud saw sex in everything, what was the reason other than that his
experience was my experience, and that his seed end my seed, being so deep
kove
in time, hae become thick with doubt and fear, becauss these accompany all
special ecstasies (the kind the gentile doesn't know)? Someone said to
me once, Sigmund Freud was talking about the Jews, it was all he knew about,
speaker
the Jewish family. Had the'men not been a Jew himself I would have been
fearful of accepting the remark, through wanting not to undermine Freud's
place on the list of great universal minds. But it then occurred to me
that I had always read his work as a private message, always wondered how
the gentile, with his awkward and tasteless habits, couldenow anythingtske
feel,
the guilt we fetts arising as it does from such gory and ecstatic battles
of the flesh! Freudian sex is family SeXe But the gentile fornicates
as one would take a bath, lingering over it or getting it dony quicklys
a matter of pleasure, even gymnastics! No echoes stretch back and forwerd
Yrack
from the gentile act, out of time present to time non-existant, to other


men who were not other men at all but flesh of the same flesh, so that
I can say now, as the moon slants through the Moorish arches, that I saw
the brimstone and fire that fell upon Sodom and Gomorrah, and that I fled
wth Lot, and went into him in the cavel Yes, loved by my husband I am
under the caresses of a hundred thousand ment
No wonder then that I fell in love with a goddess when she camel
She filled the whole doorway. The friend who had just introduced her
looked a dwarf at her side, he disappeared! Her shoulders éplmost
touched the door-jambs. ((An enormous exaggeration of Sophia's height
and
Her black hair was bunched on her
Mynss)
head like a million
snakes. She had Gorgon-Medusa eyes, staring from a Roman sarcophagus.
My husband and I stared back at this ancient acquisiton, more fabulous
than any of the ceramic or stone or bronze finds it is his profession
to buy and sell. ((Aaron never dealt in the art market. Sophia makes
the same 'error. Of course this transference to Aaron of someone
else's profession, on the part of both Sophia and his own wife, must
mean something. According to the Renegade, Sophia tried to persuade
him to attend a few Parke Bernet sales and 'worm his way in'. But
books were his life-long follys as well as livelihood. He would spend
hours of his leisure time pasting up old books and restoring torn pages.
I think perhaps there was always something rather shameful about books
for Sophia. The Mediterrenean tradition is after all such an opposite,
plastic one. She might have passed some of this feeling on to his
wife.)) My husband did the talking. They struck up one of those
friendships that happen once in twenty years and touch the depths in
a few moments. ((quite untrue.)) I waan't aware of my feelings at
once, only that something so strange had happened that my life would
have to be suspended for a time, to make room for the new experience.
For a few days I was 'narrow* and irritable with my husbande Her


tenor laugh epchoed across the lving room. When we were back in
East Fifth Street the follfowing winter she appeared-in the doorway
again, blocking out all other possibility of lifel You don't believe
in gods easily on East Fifth Street. She took an apartment in the same
block, two floors up. ((Another transference. Sophia remained in her
rooms two floors above the Hales,in Harlam.))phe abolished Harlem
for mes ((You see?)) She finished the sickening looks you got from
the blacks, she dried the spit when it landed just in front of your feet
on the sidewalk. This was before we all moved to Manhattan ((1)), intol
a more or less identical situation, with her two floors up like before
((11)). One day some
Telemann was being played on the phonograph
and I saw her whole face dance to the music, her eyes and proudly cared-
Hey were le uf,
for teeth and lips,/just as if she had been sent to us, as the stranger was
sent to Abrahama One summer we couldn't get away and had to bear one hundred
sweat that
and twenty degrees of humidity without air conditioning ((nevert)), and the k


poured out of her armpits, staining her blouse, made sweating seem the
most desirable thing in all experience for me. Whatever she did was its
own authentication! Again and again we said, You must be Jewishf To
which she sometimes said with a smile, her eyes gazing downwards in that
exquisitely interior way she has, I might become one. In fact, she said,
I have every kind of white blood in my veins except Jewish, But we didn't
define Judah that poorly, to accapt that. For us she simply was a Jew,
she came from the Mesopotamian cradle where God was first addressed,
before the first nomadic trials that led to Israel. Ipt occurred to me
that one doesn't need to be born a Jew to be a Jew at birthi The race is
the seed is Godl And with Him anything is possible. I never spoke to
my husband about this. As for my father, I know he would tell me that
God had chosen race and blood as His method, and never departed from the
Method because this would/to argue that the Method hae been unsound, and
this could not be. My father's arguments are beautiful to listen to.
They pursunde not by their reasoning but by the marvellous song of his
voice. He makes it a litany, and this litany seems chosen from outside
him, impeccable in its form, so naturally you find yourself believing it
before you have even understood it. These are night-thoughts. Both my
husband and I felt that she was a supernatural creature and had at last
found her home in us, as the tribes found Judah. Our saying to her,
Stay with us, you can take one of the apartments two floors up, the
Portorican family is moving out, was the circumcision of this creature
whose male part was as strong as the female. I went out and bought stone
kom
pestles, all I could lay my hands ong and stood, round the room with the
swollen part uppermost. She came in and when she saw them laughed and
said, What are you trying to do? Up to that time we had ahardly spoken.
((Stome bestlas urere a fealare 2 Hala knused Lolds))
But now our eyes met for a moment.
Yes, I remember her pestles. As if I could forget anything of those


Harlem dayse After two months of it I felt I was/
into hell every time I walked downstairs to see them, to put my head in the
"Black'
door and get that possessive look back. ((Presumably Jack Hale's possess-
iveness transferred?)) I used to call him Aferon (to myself) because after
we had known each other several weeks he used to walk past me with his rod
showing, on his way to the bathe ((Jack Hale, surely, again.)) It was
too hot to bother about the proprieties, and as I had never really known
anything about these anyway I took no care to keep my clothes on either.
As for her, with her stone pestles, I saw her in every state of undress,
knew every article of her clothing, even to her song's underpants which
she used to wear (when they were dirty). ((An interesting dramatisation
of Mabel's daring intimacies with her son, transferred to Aaron's wife
whose sons were by now dandling babies of their ownl)) I don't want to
dwell on these thingse The words are being torn from me, States of
dress and undress are, I know, stupendously unimportant. It was what
they were doing to me that hurte Unknown to him she used to phone me
in the middle of the night, and all night, to pour out more of her talmudic
reflections, which weré fascinating, especially as they were all mixed up
with sexa ((Mabel would phone Sophia maddeningly from her bakery in
the middle of the night, roaring with laughter. She loved to tease
especially the clumsily loving Sophia, whom she described as 'like two
big sisters'.)) I would just be falling into what she called my
"Mediterranean letherial' (a state lower than sleep) when that horrify-
ing bell would pierce through my dark worlds and at last I would manage to
raise my mountain of flesh on one elbow and say in a weak and husky voice
which I knew fascinated her, What now? He must never be told of these
night talks ((Jack Hale?)). None of her night-thoughts must take his
mind off the Talmude So in the day I had the job of responding like a
mirror to all his flashing reflections (less talmudic than genuinely


prophetic) as if I had had a good night's rest. ((This sounds most
peculiar. It is because Jack Hale was 'genuinely prophetic' in predict-
ing the black-white struggle exactly as it happened in later years.))
I went grey in a years They cut me off from my friends--yes, they
made me write a letter to the renegade Jew down the valleys saying I could
no longer 'entertain' him at a house that wasn't minel ((The Renegade,
who would make much of such a letter, never in any of his narratives
mefpions it, which indicates that perhaps this too is a transference:
from what event I do not know.)) I knew it was weakness in me to B writs
Itat latter,
ens/but I no longer had a mind to think with, my soul was under possess-
grofcs t
fom
m *e mljict
ion. Phaedrus/ Socrates
his friendysiag a
the imprisoning encroachments of a lover on L beloveds no one must
come within the loved one's sight who is richer or better educated than
the lovers the loved one must always be chaperoned by a safe friende
This is the kind of love I got. They called me disloyall
MarTRe
t rm(A transferred reference to the Hales, who
felt
well
that she needed a black 'chaperone', andjeze apt have shown jealousy
towards her white friends.))
And she was disloyal. If our apartment two floors down was hell,
I must say that hers two floors up was limbo. ((I am convinced that here
Mabel's
it may actually be Mabel speaking, or perhaps Aaron's wife thinking ter
thoughts.)) She was capable of picking up any bedraggled human object
and returning home with it like a cat with a dead rat. You never knew
what you were going to get. She seemed never to have heard of the word
privacy, perhaps because (being Mediterranean) she had never lnown real
loneliness. Being with others is so deep a biological necessity for
her, aike breathing, that she never becomes conscious of it. She could
be 'intimate' with anyone, except that there is no intimacy without
privacy. I have seen her throw her great god's arms round a dozen


smelly strangers a day, and plant kisses all over FRETE sweaty faces
had
which tave been in the subway all morning, at nightplubs or whorehouses
all night-and then she has done the same to mel
When she says we barred
her from her friends she means that after a month of having the refuse off
the New York sidewalks in our rooms-Creole queers, a couple of hearty
German sapphists, a limp Irishman who drank us out of poteen in less
could te
than an hour-we got a little tired. ((This a
what Aaron
and his wife saw at the Harlem apartment, when they visited Sophia and
conld Le
the Hales. It HEA
the burden of the Hales' lament about
Sophia, confided perhaps to the Aarons.)) When one day she brought in
a live Arab sfiekh I left the apartment and didn't come back until night-
fall. I mean, I may be semitic, but only to the extent of, the twelve
tribes. That caused me to ask her to limit her public. Her list of
telephone numbers on two continents ran into volumes. It was the biggest
item in her luggage. As for me ringing her in the middle ophne night,
that is easily explained by her never being available in the day. She
rarely came in before two in the morning, and I would ring her at ten
minutes past, when I knew she was already in # her loose African striped
dishdasha that hints at the throbbing waked bulk beneath So thrillingly.
And my husband could never be told because it might have worried him to
think of me lying awake all night, first. Second, I was in love wt with
her. Never having been guilty of a moment's sapphism even at school, I
couldn't risk him knowing thati I believe he was in love with her too,
for a time. I mean love in our sensel The mandrakes give a smell,
and at our gates are all manner of pleasant fruits, new and old, which
I have laid up for thee, 0 my beloved!


It freally does seem to be clear that in desire (I was going to say
imagination, but this is only the baggage train of desire) Sophia and
Aaron's wife had an affair. Yet they were never more than strangers!
they never touched each otheri they never said more than a formal word
to each otherl As to how far the 'Sophia' loved by Aaron's wife, and
the 'Aaron's wife' loved by Sophia approximated to the existing or even
once-existing Sophia and Aaron's wife, it is a less important matter
than the fact that this non-existant affair of theirs changed the course
of their livest
What is actually achieved, what becomes expressed and physically
verifiable-this end-product of life--is not life's most interesting
part. We are perhaps most changed by what we do not express, do not
see, dare not even hope for. Only Sister Mahatma, of all the people
who make themselves recognisable in this book (among a great jumble of
unidentifiable testimonies), seems aware of this greater part of life
that is going on all the times and I mean by 'aware' actually living,
herself, in that great part, as it manifests itself silently all round
her. Later, the Mother Superior will describe how Sister Mahatma
seems to know all her thoughts in their turmoil, and to 'see/thedog-
pill scandal, though she has heard nothing about it. For Sister
Mahatma takes minimal account of what I describe as the physical end-
product. She seems therefore to move, body and soul, in another time
realer than 'our time. She does not see herself as on a moving belt
of time, her life ticking away in secondse The clock does not hold
her in its iron grip. It is she who changes the Mother Superior's
life, without 'doing' anything (or even saying very much). Through her
the Mother Superior sees her own past for the first times its order,
but not its rational order, unfolds to her. She begins to realise,
for instance, why in her Munich youth Einstein's doctrine of relativity
erete


had interested her so deeply. She now sees that the doctrine effect-
ively destroys the idea of rational law in the universe, by placing the
law in the observer. It makes everything the observer sees relative to
himself-which means not only to his position in space and time, to his
desires (all information-seaking has its built-in desires, naturally),
but to the form of his minde The doctrine harks back to Immanuel
Kant's Critique without perhaps quite realising ita Einstein and Kant
(childen 2 Binp Berkeley)
begin to seem to the Mother Superior the two great revolutionaries/who
despite themselves destroyed rationalism once and for all. Long before
Einstein, Kant's doctrine - described space and time as built into
the act of perceiving itself, not 'objjective' or outside us. They were
the 'necessary conditions' of all perception. They were not to be found
in the impressions that poured on to the mind through the sensess These
were simply impressions--touches, colours, sounds, rushing into the mind
without any, built-in form of their own. We taste this formlessness only
on certain rare occasions, in delirium,in halfasleep, in madness, though
the moment consciousness awakes in us the perceiving process starts up
and the impressions differentiate themselves into M objects in
space and time, they begin to separate from each other but above all
fram oursalves, and we are able to say that they are no longer simply
our impressions, belonging to our tactile or aural faculties, but have
a life of their own, 'objective'. It is all done, this separating,
as an automatic partor the perceiving process itself. Likewise,
when we see these 'objects' in space and time as having weight or
volume or substance, as standing in relation to each other, it means
that our minds have been at work, with their built-in 'categories' as
Kant called them, of substance, volume, relation--in one word forme
Form lies inside us, not 'outside'. The very concept of 'outside'
is made by us inside. So is the concept 'inside: Eiastein added a second


corrective to the idea that form lies 'outside' us. He said that
whalever observed
the form of det we
was precisely determined by our position
secondly,
and manner of approach, which |were not static but, like the objects
we observed, in constant movement through space and time. It was for
this reason that he TMNS maintained that 'it is the theory that
decides what we can observe, not vice versa'. On the basis of this
bomb thrown at the Christian space-time cosmology that had grown up over
the centuries (that h "we' are inside and 'reality' outside) he founded
his revolution.
Graeco -Roman ongin,
Now what does * space-time cosmology, of 1
- nes
really claim? That there is no reality outside space and time, which
means to say that there is no. reality apart from the perceiving function!
And this in turn means not only that we perceive all possible reality
but that the perceiving function is the only one we have to penetfrate
wirk!
lifel On these absurdities, one might say, a whole civilisation has
been based-or rather, disastrous attempts to do so were made, and are
due only now for final dumping. The Mother Superior began to see that
the young drug-addicts who poured into the mainland hospital (mostly
Anglo-Saxon and German) had found their escape from this cosmology
through drugs alonel She saw that there were many paths out of the
Were
cosmology, but drugs = definitely one of them. It was the key to
her success in rehabilitating some of the most extreme casese
She came to realise that the M alternative to Kanten 'categories
of the understanding', apilt into the mind and able to con struct per-
recessanly
ceptions into an objective or 'outside' world, was
as he himself
rnoy
said, 'a phantasmagoria of sensations'. For her/- alternative to
space and time, to the world of ordered objects hhich we needed in order
atall
to lead practical lives, was a reality mtotws not perceived (but sick
took possession of the perceiver, so that he found himself beyond space


A 8
and time, in a condition neither 'inside him nor 'outside' him but
totally comprehensive, as if the originating breath of life had been
found, the anvil at which both disordered impressions and the ordering
faculties which took them in hand were created. Both the order and the
disorder become, for her, simply convenient functions to help pilot the
prisoner through the temporary destiny of the flesh. In neither lay
realityg
She saw that since Kant and Einstein lived by the glorification of
the mind, they could never have reached her conclusion, however much it
seemed necessitated by their own doctrines. She saw clearly that they
had put a bomb under western thought (just as she saw that their discov-
eries, though momentous for the west, had been the accepted basis of
Indian thought for thousands of years, since long before Christ).
When asked by a New York rabbi, in a cable, whether # he believed in God,
Einstein wired back I BELIEVE IN SPINOZA'S GOD WHO REVEALS HIMSELF IN
THE HARMONY OF ALL THAT EXISTS NOT IN A GOD WHO CONCERNS HIMSELF WITH
THE FATE AND ACTIONS OF MEN. Did this harmony mean for Einstein,
in contradiction of his own doctrines, something in the nature of a
rational or mental order which was discovered by enquiry? When one
of his pupils took his relativity doctrine to a logical conclusion
and declared that scientific 'facts' could not be established, only
momentary perceptions of possibilities', Einstein replied simply,
God does not play at dice. In other words, he failed to see that
the 'Principle of
his pupil called was less a
Indeterminey",as
denigration of God's order than of the human being's ability to perceive
it. The alternative to law, for Einstein, was clearly chance,
namely another aspect of laws both within the compass of the mind.
Thus, he refused to push rationalism over altogether, having, like


Kant, knocked it sideways. For once you enter the rationalist prison,
only a bomb will get you out (this is a quote from one of the Mother
Superior's narratives). Ironically, as the Mother Superior will say
later, it was Einstein who suggested the manufacture of THE bomb for the
first time, to an American president. That bomb was perhaps the climax
of a cosmology that, because exc lusively rationalist, had begun, in
its bankruptcy, to rely more and more on the explosion as its key to the
release of energy. A much truer analysis was achieved, she says, by
the Indians, the Chinese, the Arabs, and perhaps by the Arfrcans in a
forgotten cosmology that survives only fragmentarily as voodoo. This
ties in with her view that, unlike some of these highly developed
peoples, we have not yet passed the barbarian stage of enquiry.
But this is looking forward too far. For the moment, let us
see these narratives in Einsteinian terms. Not only are Sophia and
Aaron's wife, and indeed all the speakers here, in relation to each
other, but they are constantly being modified by each other's constant
movement, just as they themselves are modifying others by their alter-


ing roles and therefore perspectives. Through such complicated
conditions we 'see' each other-and it is no wonder that the other's
appearance, his smiles or frowns, his words or lack of them, are poor
guides. We should always perhaps keep in mind an analogy from the
stars: we are still looking at stars that exploded a thousand or more
ago
years! This is the kind of 'sight' we have of other human begngs!
We never used to walk upstairs to her apartment without some kind
of offering in our hands. But then, just before reaching the door,
we would hear a voice-not hers-and then another voice--still not
hers-and so on until we crept back downstairs again because the
offering (once it was a terracotta piece from the Geometric period
which my husband picked up for a song) would have looked, in the eyes
of strangers, ridiculously what it was-an offering to a god. We
tried to persuade her that Moses was only able to lead his people out
of Egypt because of great powers he had acquired in solitude, and that
had he kept counsel with all and sundry, even with Aaron his priest,
the tribes would still have been in Egypt today- Out of purity and
silence comes the word of power, as some eastern mystic has said!
Moses developed himself to listen to other voices than human ones, my
husband told her. Thus Pharoah came to Moses and asked him to plead
to his Lord to end the plague of frogs, and then later the swarms of
flies, and then later the boils, and later the cattle-plague. Thus
Moses, a servant and a forengner, built up great pawer for himself.
The first hint of this power was vouchsafed to him in the form of the
burning bushe The bush didn't actually burn, my husband told her in his
marvellously quiet way. Moses saw it burn, from inside himself. He
spoke to God from inside himselfi You can't do that if you live in


the tittle-tattle of the world all dayt My husband almost shouted at
her at fei point. When God asked Moses to throw down his rod, and Moses
did, and it turned out to be a serpent, that again was inside Moses, it
meant that his sex, his animal powers had been transposed into dynamic
spiritual ones! This is the meaning of the rodi The rod and the seed
are the same forcel There lay the power of the children of Israell
Under Abraham, under Isaac, under Jacob and Joseph and Moses the children
were marked out by this special power! So he crooned and pometimes E
shouted his way through his arguments, trying to get her to undertake the
full obligation of this power to which she now believed shehad been 'born'.
But instead she used us as Pharoah did Moses, she needed the blessing of
our Lord but once she had it she hardened her heart and like Pharoah would
not let the people go! This is why I always called her (inside myself)
a traitor.
If I could come in again at this stage with a few facts, it might
be relevant and even helpful. I have already described the facts about
how I walked uphill to take a simple evening highball and was frowned on by
the goy, received with oil and incense by the Jew. Now the facts about
the apartment she took two floors above them in East Fifth Street were I
believe as followst they already had their hands on the lease of that
apartment, knowing that the Portoricans were about to leave, and hoped I
think to convert it into offices, and were awaiting state or city permiss-
ion. When Soppia appeared they offeged it to her, and furnished iy with
some of the office furniture which they had already bought. When she
asked about the rent he said in his patriarchal way, laying a hand on hers,
That's your money. Keep it for yourself. I would have bought that apart-
ment anyway. Those are the facts and no comment is necessary.
((The Renegade believes a fact to be almost anything he thinks to be
true. He finds himself such a rational and unexaggerating man that a


it is inconceivable to him that his mind should even receive anything
that w not trues naturally he would not trust an informant who was
as Kimeelg.
not alea sober and unexaggerating in deliveryk People only have to
have an acknowledged position in life for him, as doctors or lawyers or
professors or bankers, and to speak in an unmoved voice, preferably with
hints of humility such 'I think perahaps' and 'of course I am not one
hundred percent certain but', for the Renegade to lodge his facts as
absolute ones in his own minde This is how he got hold of the above
story, though I cannot say who the informants were. It is actually the
story, though not exactly so, of what went on between the Hales and Sophia
over her renting of the rooms two floors above theme Hale needed an
office, and gave it to her with some of the office furniture he had bought.
So transference has gone on in the Renegade's mind too. But he credits
himself on the same principle as he credits others-he himself has and
acknowledged position in life! Now in the following narrative we have
Sophia agreeing with the Renegade about this perfectly fabricated 'event'
in New York! She follows it with a description of how she pupt spangles
on the naked wife of Aaron. One can certainly imagine Mabel Hale patting
the bed at her side and inviting Sophia to decorate her, with waves of
rch
Rere
frotiny laughter too. This laughter is/missed out, to achieve better
the fabricated Jewish atmospherel))
Yes, I remember the sallow pallor of his hand, freckled, as he put
it down on my arm, not because I was looking at it particularly but
because I felt a flame go through me from ite That's your moneys he
said, for you to spend. I was possessed by that flamel I felt a new
time I felt
significance, something fluttered into life in my bodyl And at the same k


possessed in the worldly sense--caught and owned by another human being.
So with the flame of life came a paralysis of action. I began to think I
was nothing, came from nothing, could do nothing. I forgot my own mother's
name. Yest I couldn't recall a single friend. I had undergone a terrible
kind of marroige. The three of us sat together in throbbing silences.
That night, after he had refused any rent, she phoned me at my crumbfy
downtown hotel and we talked like sisters. She told me I had been 'sent'
(LA posibls trwwlach t Mabal,tkis)).
to' thank And how careful we must be. I moved in a week later. There
was a bread-breaking ceremony: they had a round loaf baked
CCA doginite Krwtack LarrdAtu). r.
with a hole in the top to take a wooden bowl of salt/ We kissed and then
had a drink. Then I learned that love seeketh only self to please, and builds
a hell in heaven's despite. Of course we weren't careful at all. Each
of us, in different ways, had always failed to practise care. I remembered
Dante's line that love isnt the seed only of good but of every operation
that deserves punishment! He put jewels on her, clothed her nakedness in
their glitter, and allowed me to look ons I revelled in our closeness.
All my life I had looked for a family. I always shall. It isn't that
I lacked a mother and father, but who can be mother and father to Amphibia?
I remember how those bronzed, curly-headed little beasts on the beach used
to stare at me when I came along after breakfast-like something 'sent',
yes I was always like thatl Their mouths used to fall open and their great
black eyes settled on me like coins. Wet sand dripped from their fingers,
fresh from theconstruction of sand castles. When I spoke they looked
terfified. And then one-it was always one-would come closer. It
was always one. I could even say that there is a numerical proportion of
people, about thirty percent, who gravitate towards me because they feel
in the first few moments that they need something which I can provide (I
endow not only the hope of satisfaction but the need for itl). It seems
to them that at last I've comel Sometimes it seems to me that it is the


same creature who steps forward every time, in different bodies. Again
I wish I wasn't saying all this. The words are being torn from me like
I a can only say like the moment itself, the climax that splits the universe
in a thousand pieces HEm instead of bringing it together.
Kissing comes easily to me. She said to me once, You are capable of
kissing anything-it doesn't even have to be cleanl I touch their bulges
with a lack of premeditation which makes them gasp! For the embrace has
always been touched with shame for them. It comes as easily from me as a
smilel So they respond as easily! It wasn't long before I was putting
bracelets on her too. He happened to leave the room for a moment, and it
seemed that I was simply going on with his job. Whom they wish to destroy
they first make blinde Little by little that hood of misunderstanding
I know so well came down over my head. I mean the mounting feeling in
me that he was doing her a swinish injustice by touching her at alll
I began to see her as a garden inclosed, a spring shut up, a fountain
sealedi She was the source of every marvel in the house, he a stone
columni Yes, a column in the Roman style, with the head mounted on top
and small protruding genitalia half way down! There began the familiar
horror, all the worse for being at close quarters, of the male entering
the femalel I wanted to dash across the city to Times Square and start
a revolution, call out the fire squad to separate them with hoses!
I wanted to knowck him down when he spoke to her in a whisper. Oh how
familiarl The male seems to me to be exploiting the fragrant female in
the most fiendishly calculating way, stimulating her parts to get into her
but not love herl My beginning to feel protective towards her was also
part of the usual process. The hood comes down and I see no morel
You see, I am terrified of men. When I had a fight with a priest a
little crowd gathered and helped him, not mel All because I was wearing
trousers in churchl I cried for a whole day afterwards. Sometimes I
cry long enough to be washed clean all over! I wash the touch of their


hands off me. I don't mean that I am not responsible for the fights I
get into-I always ap-but they have failed to understand mes they
been
should not have/provoked to fight a shadow, therefore their hands are
uncleanl The only ones I come to love-I mean, of the men-are those
who show me a kind of monastic forbearance, who on their side deliberately
become shadows for me to fight. They are E rare. ((Jack Hale was poss-
ibly one of thems Certainly his was the marriage she tried to
put,
Would she have liked to
the Aaron one too? But, more interesting,
would Aaron's wife have liked it?))
Im must get to the bottom of this. It seems that everything spect-
acular that happens to me-days of tears or days of joys-comes from my
being of mixed birth. I do not mean specifically 'mixed in sex' here,
much less in the fact of my father's patrician temperament shoring the
storms of my mother's peasant temperament. ((We must guard against
thinking Sophia a liar. She probably sees her mother and father
whom she never knew--much more clearly than if she had met them!))
I mean that I am mixed in function, so that I appear to people as an
incarnation of what they need, and yet I am not an incarnation. This
is difficult but I do mean something. It seems that they always need
me for something far beyond the earth,of a visionary character. And
yet I am only earth. You can call me an earth-god like she does.
That isn't true either. I do take them beyand earth-those who are
so deeply entombed in it that they cry to be let out, to see some light.
But the people I really belong to are those who need no help. I mean
that small family of men and women who are beyond me as the creator is
beyond the creature, the light beyond the flame. Why was I made-
to personify the creature in the creator, the flame in the light,
without touching the creator, the light? Do you know what I mean?
I have wishes and dreams, and these arè answered. The creator, the
light are close to mee Argus guards me with a hundred eyess But


I am never vouchsafed a direct vision of the light! I can never move
closer! It is as if I have to remain the earth-incarnation to help
people, mostly the inferior! There are so many in need of help. It
is the army of people not bright enough ever to have known the flame,
let alone the light, that I must minister tol I have to show them the
earth-glow. The joy and the pity. I wake singing. They love ite


need
They Fe to hear it, a kind of testimony. So I have this bound function.
one
I am bound. I could never have been bound in this way had I been/sex or the
other. I would have squirted myself to freedom! But as it is I have to go
on looking for my family, finding it everywhere. My function is to be bounde
I live in purgalory.
Something like that. I feel tired and confused. Sometimes I sleep for days
on end.
The point about purgatory is that its inmates are suffering to an end,
they are purging themselves. They aren't victims. They came towards
Dante and Virgil but with care never to be out of the flames that licked them.
((whiih trestinfact, she and te Hales).
In the Harlem apartment we three did that! We kept a foot in the heat,
wilk
when we werejother people, or at work. We yearned to be devoured
sedilude!
agmir,
remember walking towards East Fifth
sleet blowing almost
Btreet/with I
horizontal and the sidewalks white and blank of people, the parked caraf
humped with snow. I believe it may even have been Christmas (naturally
tkat
we didn't celebrate jae marvellous creature'shirth), I had my greatcoat
buttoned up tight at my chin, with a fur cap and ear-flaps too, pressing
forward against the burning ice-particles, and I happened to pass a doorway
with 2A whitewashed on it, and two black lines deleting it. At the next
doorway I stopped. On it was printed, very carefully, 2B OR NOT 28, THAT
IS THE QUESTION. Some wit was having a wrangle with the mail people.
The door was neat. It might be a doctor's door-a little above the tone
of the rest of the block. And the letters kept ringing in my heade
Wasn't that my question? whether to end the heart-ache and the thousand
natural shocks the flesh is heir to? 2B a Jew, or not 2B a Jew?-that was
my question, better put. I hedn't, it seemed, a friend in the worldi
Something like the driving sleet surrounded my life. So might I not end
this state of being only an earth-incarnation--always flesh being touched,
and touching flesh--always putting the black hood of hatred over my head,
always giving a woman less than she had ever had before, after promising the


most? Give it to me, let me have itl they shout-and I cling to my
panties that are like a chastity-belt round me, their elastic immovable
to the tearing female hande Yes, they are aware of something--some rod
but,my God,to tear it out of me, the pain! I couldn't go through it.
It was always me with my lavishing kisses that seemed to seduce. But in
truth I know it was always she, wboever she was! She needed her journey
through n
towards the vision she had glimpsed 1
1ET t and I had to perform
the operation (*deserving punishment') which would tear a hole in her routines
of dullness which the years had made. I became the window in her self-
Bane prison. A window in someone else's life, what a destiny! But I
couldn't free her. You can only do that for yourself. She stayed in
prison, yearning for the window again, after I had gone, aching for the
phone to ring again if I happened to be passing near by onf of my end-
less jet-tripstin East Fifth Street it was at least different. This was no A.
a safe prison. At the least it was purgatory, For one thing, she was
never quite like the other women. It even began to seem that she needed
me less than I needed her, Aaron went on with his antiquarian routines,
returning now and then to the apartment with a rare Etruscan crown of gold
leaf or a head dredged from the Tiber, while sheand I waited fervently for
the night. She said, The truth is only really told at night. In the
morning she slept, and I went, tyinto her darkened room (sometimes)and sat on
her bed. Always I had to caryy thijer with me which I have never told
to a living soul-that I came neither as man nor woman, nor even as a third
creature, nor even as the consummation fof all these, but as an enigma which
time must soon find out. fogriuty X
I could always get out of a situation
before this enigma came home to me-I could move on to another 'family'.
But not nowa She had her slim eyes on me. She laid her long fingers, so
different from his, on my arm and looked at me, and I was once more aware
of a power which at that time I could only call Israel. It poured into


me and I suddenly wanted to sing certain of those Moorish chants I had
learned as a childe And as suddenly I was dragging myself across the
foom like dead guts. The slightest of the natural shocks the flesh is
heir to sent me leaping from a high mood to a lowe They watched all
this, delighted and amazed at my variety. It seemed to me that the
enigma was at last being solved, that I could actually B in the world,
no longer just appear at its corners from nony like a god, always
causing mouths to gape, the wet send to tricle down from their fingers.
I had found my familyl I began to ask her questions. I suddenly
asked, Am I free? And she replied, just as if her husband were speaking
for hers Akiva said everything is in the hands of God except the fear
of Gode And I had to think that out. Sometimes she went to him with
my questions. One of them was, How do you know God? And his reply
was, Through his help and his mercy, through his actse I asked, Is that
a Jewish point of view? Indeed yes, he saide God told Moses I am that
I am, no more. I was exhausted, elated all in one. I hardly slept
but still sang in the morning, It was good to feel that the sun was
a light shining straight from Godl That was Mis act of mercy, His help,
to pour it through the window while I sat huddled over my coffeel
((This is a 'real' account of what she derived from the Aaronse They
were the first to talk to her since her convent days about prayer, not they
that they tried to convert her.)) Friends said to me, What's happened
to you? in those ringing gentile tones that make life seem only its
surfaceo I had great bulges under my eyes, and, as I said before,
my hair was turning grey. Your snakes are changing their coats,
Medusa, she would say with her fingers in my hair. I adored her
the most wonderful boy that had ever lived because there was no danger
of her ever growing into a mani I screwed little earings into her slim
lobes, gently. He watched this, smiling.


He worked with an energy I couldn't understand. When he wasn't
on his rounds he read massively. ((Here Aaron has become a booko
antiquarian again)) His tables were piled with catalogues.
If I happened to tiptoe through their apartment at six in the morning
(she would be sinking into her first sleep of the day) I would hear him
at his prayers in another room, a deep chant on one note. I imagined him


swaying from side to side. I felt it threw a cylinder of protective light
round mee Suddenly I felt that I had never been born because I had always
been here, and that I could never die because I had never been bornm that
birth and death were only willed changes of state in the body, and I was not
more!
my Ed7 His prayers went through me like a vast charge of energys reform-
ing all my impulses, making a neat and for the first time understandable
paraphrase of all the foggy experiences I had had in life. Then she would
call me softly. I don't want to be dramatic and suggest that she tore me
from my long overdue appointment with God. But she did call mea She
always seemed to know when I was wandering about, she always called me back.
Someone said to me once, She's the only wicked woman I've met. It was
precisely this knowledge she had of other people's states, and her desire
to call them back from their transports, that made her seem so. She had
an all-pervading, all-consuming energy of self-projection that was like his
energy of work. A headstrong, moody, murmuring race, as Drydem called
theml
One morning she called me and I felt nothing but pleasure. I went
in straight away. She was wide awake with the curtains closed, and the
outside
city/From which we seemed so deeply abstracted was beginning its appalling
life. The papers talked about war. Another girl was stabbed in Grand
Central park. But our little tabernacle was unshaken. I had begun to
fear even the short walk to the delicatessen, not because of the fear hang-
ing over thestreets but because outside wasn't home. I began to work like
a madman. I never worked so much in all my life. I had never felt so
safe-so frightened---so unsafel That sentence puts it deftly. The
more safety I felt, the less safe I seemed to be. The safety of the
tabernacle was such that it made everywhere else from Rumpelmeyer's to
the Henry Miller theatre hostile and strange, and as they seemed hostile,
so home seemed all the more safe. The double action was most distpesssing.


I began to realise that her not sleeping at night came from having too
little confidence in the outside world. It was even a kind of godlessness.
She couldn't bring herself to fall into the night's beguiling arms! So, in
According la Rar
her wakefylness, she was my Argus with a hundred watchful eyes. You had to
have so many eyes to pick up all the false promises, the enmity veiled by
smiles, the insidiously wrong advice, the blandly cheerful invitations to
diaster that the world offered yous She tended me as carefully as a garden.
If we dined separately her first question on my return in the middle of the
night was inuariably, Now what rubbish have you been eating? I à came to care
more for my body, Taking a bath one morning, running water down my chest
(I will not say bosom), I thought of the words "you are washing the taber-
nacle of your soul'.
When I went into her that morning she said in her slim way, as if
afraid to disturb the air and set up resistance to the straight shaft of
her will, Would you like to lie down? I stared at her. I'm wide awake,
I said, my day's beginning! All the better, she said. My day's beginning
too, And she patted the bed at her side. I turned quickly towards the
door as if to lock it, but she shook her head, still smiling. I want to
put all my jewels and spangles on you, she said. She had them all at her
side. And she began to clothe me in them precisely as he did her. It
was an exact repatition of his movements. The touch of every pearl or
polished wood surface was like a message, underlined by her gaze, floating
over me in slim eyes. I thought for a moment that she meant to battle
with khe elastic round my middle, but it was only the slightest touch of
ber hand, almost as if she were mocking my fears. I was quivering with
excitement, and when she fell asleep I was lying there like a glass case
in a jeweller's shop, and shining with sweat. And if he walked in?
But her smile, even while she slept, seemed to discount the importance
of this. Tortuously I edged myself into a sitting posstion, terrified of


waking her, and bit by bit replaced the jewellery in a pile at her side.
Then I got into my clothes and left.
Aarm
One dey/we brought a lot of new finds home and we were examining them
in the deadly afternoon heat. He began a peculiar sort of chanting, which
was about the obgects, I discovered, and yet about me too. He picked up an
ikon and said, Look, who knows that a grandfather of mine may not have
gazed at that once in the Ukraipe. Or this cross from Warsaw may have
been held by a Jesuit priest thgree hundred years ago as he passed the
corpse of en ancestor of mine who had hitherto been living peacefully among
Lutherans and Calvinists. That picture of a synagogue in the snows I think
it's the Rhineland, and perhaps my own father went in there to pray. In
a Rembrandt crucifixion I remind myself that those are my ancestors stand-
ing there. The Domenico Tiepolo drawing of the Venetian money-lenders
I nearly laid my hands on last week shows maybe a forbear of mine. This
Byzantine chalice, picked up in one of the crusades, may have been in the
hands of a French or Venetian knight whose horse trampled one of my ancestors
to death en the edge of Constantinople. He spoke it all in what seemed at
first an artificial way. Fe was glaring at me in the dimness behind the
half-drawn curtains. I felt feverish. The afternoon light was sickly,
damp. The savage throb of the city was like the thunder of his hidden
wrathe And the Sumerian statuette, perhaps one of our people handled it,
close to Babylon, before Abraham started a trek that lasted thousands of
years, before Israel was borne But they weren't my ancestors! I almost
screamed at hime Don't you feel it already, that they are? he asked with
what I hardly dared interpret as irony. Do you think we would have someone
here in our midst night and day whose ylood wasn't ours? But our bldods
aren't the samel I screamed again. He made a click of his tongue.
Israel was a man, he said, he became a state, a people, a religion.
Don't you realise it's all the same thing? And at that moment I looked


across the dark room to where she was sitting, and realised as she gazed
back at me with her slim smile that my heart was become the bellows and
the fan to cool a gypsy's lust.
Aaron
Sometimes je was disturbingly cryptic. Once I happened to be talking
about how I ought to settle down somewhere, build a house (it was before they
had found the island) and he said, his hand laid over his paunch, his check
shirt open at the neck (or rather down to the navel), Did you know that the
word eternity occurs only once in the Bible? And that was that.
Whenever he said something of this #order she always watched me,
smiling, without a word on her own acoount. Only at night did she speak,
whispering, down the phone. I began to wonder if the smile wasn't a sign
to me not to listen to him too deeply. Someone said to me once that fear,
shame and hatred are a trinity, and that fear WEES the womb of the other two.
It = correspandingly the hardest of the three to get rid of. Her smile,
and her silence whenever he spoke, seemed to argue fear of him. Her looking so E
like a fragile boy in the morning confirmed it for me. Fear was in her
light but aching movements as she crassed the room, in the sigh she made
when she lowered her head on the pillow as dawn tinted the curtains a dirty
metallic grey. Yes, that was the burden she was carrying about! Hatred
and shame must followl And I began to share the fear, feel the accompanying
shame and latred too. I became defiant of him, since this is my way of demon-
strating fear. Not to his face, however. But sometimes when she was dragg-
ing herself to the kitchen to start a succulent dish for him (he ate ravenously
as if it were a last hasty meal before the tribes struck camp) I managed to
craw her out of it again, before she had touched a pot. This led to some
quietly talmudic scenes, and the Book of the Law was read out, as the expected
gerukitefische, which after all takes two hours to preparew(done his way)
failed to appear. There was no open rebellion. What I did wasn't done
in a mean state of minde Simply that my love for her wanted to spare her
hours of drudgery. Once when shewas about to mention him I leaned forward


and in one heavy movement which now brings the sight of leaping purgatorial
flames to my mind, I stopped her mouth with a large kiss.
I remember that kiss as perhaps the most astonishing of my life because
it had no unfamiliarity for me. I felt less inhibition with her, naked or
clothed, than with anyone I ever knew. And this seemed to prove all the
more what my husband said, that she was a Jewfs however gentile her origin.
She had simply found her Jewish birth with us. And the second strangest
thing about that kiss (in a long repertoire of strange things) was that I
swore never to make love to a gentile again. My father would be horrified
at the idea but I felt in that moment God kissing me, yes, the Shechina
himselfi Afterwards I thought FÉ what Diotima of Mantineia told Socrates
itwas
about the nature of love-fa daemon for conveying messages from the gods
to ourselves, and back again, because God did not mix with men; so He needed,
and we needed, a way for messages to go back and forth. And I knew that a
message was being conveyed to me in that kiss. It made a shudder go through
ny life (I don't mean through my body). Everything in the apartment
changed for me, my friends seemed to have different names, I could barely
remember the life I had led an hour before, I picked up my old life from
signs, I tapped my way with a blind man's stick between objects I had been
looking at for twenty years. I went to the kitchen to start the evening
meal add then forgot why I was there, and found myself talking to her instead
in another room, with the curtains drawn against the light, and the ikons
and the Byzantine mosaic shining.
I began not to be able to bear it when his key turned in the lock and
he laid some new treasures on the table, and she went back to her corner
and watched him with her slim smile as if he had frozen her womb. How
man-and-wife ever came to be conceived I cannot imagine! Surely society
imposed such an idea? The height not simply of absurdity but of imposs-
ibility that a woman should ever be thought to be able to live--should
ever think herself able to live-with, of all creatures, a manl I have


watched so many couples in my life without understanding what went on
between them. How 'her' softness, 'her' fertilising largesse ever com-
bined with 'his' nervous and fitful domineering D could no more see than I
could see the coupling of dogs and angels. Every home I entered gave me
the same shock of surprise-how could such monstrously opposite creatures
spend a moment, let alone a lifetime, together? It seemed to me a most
appalling imbalance that had been tolerated for the purposes of progeny
alone. I believe that the ancient civilisations managed to avoid it by
not extanding that quick romp on the bed, needed for childbirth, into a
lifelong perversion of nature. The women loved women, the men men. It
was in Roman times, namely during the degeneration of Greek culture, that
this began to change. And the biological act was allowed fully to diffuse
itself into monstrous social habits under Christianity, which in respect
of the disciplines and rituals of daily life was a degeneration of the
Roman! In the sane society the two types of creature are quite separate-
they regard themselves as separate, and live and think separately. The
harem, far from being a feature of the maltreatment of women, was their
realisation (I am sure they exchanged more thrills between themselves than
they did at the accomodation of any circumcised rod). The Jewish world too-
surely the rule of natural separation Ea held? I talked to her about it.
I mentioned Socrates (whom she barely) seemed, to have heard of) and watched
her while I went through Alcibiades' speech where he describes the first
types of mankind, before the gods divided them-the three types, the male,
the female and the androgynous or mixed. All these creatures had two
faces, pointing opposite ways, with four ears, four arms and four legs,
and two sexual members each. They were completely round, and could hop
about in the most astonishing way. Some of them were two males in one.
wek
Others/two females in one. And the third were a mixture. Homer describes
how two of these powerful creatures, Otys and Ephialtes, dared to climb up
to heaven and were pear to manhandling the gods. Then Zeus struck on the


idea of weakening them by slicing them in half. He cut down the middle
and got Apollo to twist their faces round the other way so that they were
on the same side as the flat or cut section, leaving the genitalia at the
back. Apollo then drew the skin round and knotted it at the navel, and
the the job was thought to be finished. But the severed creatures felt
such a deep Aphyiscal loss that they began to yearn for each other. The
males,
males who had been severed from male clung to Ramakesy the females who had
been seyred from glemale clung to Aemales, while the mixed lot began to cling
to each other. Everyone was in such a pitiful state that the gods had to
do something drastic. They turned the sexual members round to the front,
and the males began to generate inside the females instead of on the ground,
as formerly. I watched her all the whilea She smiled. I think the
point got home to her, that these first creatures who had been complete,
four arms and four legs, were the ones to scale heaven, and that by being
divided they were weakened, and that by being divided further, into male
and female, they were weakened further, and that the yearning of male for
male and female for female is more appropraate to our destiny. I wanted
to rush into their apartment and like Hamlet shout, I say we will have no
more marriages! I couldn't bear the air of the place when they were
together. I went from chair to chair, opened all the windows. I asked
myself how long the imprisonment had to be borne-her imprisonment.
And she always spopped me actually saying it-with a hand over my mouth.
I suppose this was the generative order of events-love of her, breeding
fear of him, breyding hatred of him, breeding shame. I once asked some-
one why we should be ashamed to hate and he said, Because you are hating
yourself. I couldn't understand that. I tried to love the jound of his
key in the door, and to lose myself in the little bit of glowing terracotta
he put down on the table, but I always caught her eyes, and the generative
order of love-fear-hate was aflame again, the apartment was afirel
I thrilled at every new piece of violence in the papers. I would


have committed any larceny simply to objectify my feelings, see them on
other facesl Destroyers are those destroying themselves! In my crying
(whee haviym ske stroyesis
fits I called aloud to myself, Where have you gone?, meaning myself. And,
Will they ever let me go?, meaning would I ever let them go? And all this
time I really believe they perceived no suffering in me. Suffering drama-
tises my face, renders it haunted like one of those late-Greek tarmic
heads, with eyes aghast. They took this for my real face. I had never
before been afraid of madness. Now purgatory threatened to pass into hell,
where the burning is no longer voluntary, and E has no cessation! In my
waking moments-I mean, when I opened my window at dusk, it might be, and
suddenly woke up to my life, and looking down into the street surveyed it
all like the tiny leg-splaying figures below-I was tickled to see how a
sort of theology was growing in me, whereas until then churches had been
simply aesthetic for me. I could no longer trust my powers. Therefore
I had to resort to a more powerful source of power than my own rude health.
C E
He poninued to enter the apattment of an evening with a rare find, he put
his arm round my neck as warmly and confidently as ever (was he mad too?),
above all he talked about her when she wasn't there, praising her until I
fum
could have knocked him down. If I saw lr putting spangles and brocades
on her now I gave her a puckered look from the other room and zoomed stormily
out of the apartment. She would smile from the bed-always the smilel
I wondered one day, when he fell over a chair and went skidding along the
floor with a kylix in his hand (trust him to hold ithloft in such a way
that it wasn't even scratched), I wondered he didn't know it was me willing
it. And there was now hardly a thing I did or thought that black shame
didn't swallow up immediately afterwards.
ale S VEES LEU Bwn VIRICA C


We have thus been treated to a description of her life with the
Hales galvanised into a new form by her desire for 'the slim one'.
olove,
It is interesting that she mentioned 'black shame' tet =
She
seems to be bringing what she leanned from the Aarons (the theology)
backwards to Harlem, while bringing the "black shame', ecstatic and
agonising, of her Harlem life forwards into the orderly Aaron fapart-
ment. Quite a mosaicl How ruthlessly our desires range over charact-
ers and situations! And Aaron's wife, who through the smallest glances
may have picked up this desire, or without moving a muscle simply have
provoked it herself, is in her daydream kissed by Sophia, and it feels
like God kissing herl So, with the two parties agreeing, does it not
in the most valid sense happen, without it happening physically? Where
Sophia does not create new events she creates at least new dreams.
The latter are = possibly more potent.
Now, all this time, she is receiving little notes from the Aaron
villa up the road, and returning answers. These notes are usually
conveyed by the Aaron maid,Miranda, or by Sophia's maid (whose name is
never divulged either by Cassandra or herself, I cannot say why).
These notes enquire after health, send best wishes, look forward to the
next meeting. But the meeting does not happen. It is planned often
enough but never fails to be cancelled by one side or the other at the
last minute. Thus thoughts can drive people apart without anything
observable happening between themi The thoughts simply grow, and since
thoughts are never alone but send out strong radiating shafts to other
minds, you have a deadlock as com plete as if there had been an open
quarrel. We shall see that Aaron too joins in the fabricated love
situation between Sophia and his wife. He "hates' Sophia now. She
becomes a "mountain' for him, blocking his path, the more absent she
is-as we shall hear from him later. She only ceases to be this


'dark mountain' for him when she suddenly steps into his house after an ahanceg
five or seven years
and without a hullo begins raving about
Sister Mahatma. That is, her actual presence dispels the thoughts that
have been piling up in his minde No wonder dictators clamp down on
thoughts-they recognise their potencyl What they do not recognise
is that sending them into frightened silence renders them far, far more
and
potent! Suppress religion B its child art, where our thoughts range
most boldlys and YOU ARE DOOMED, said one of the speakers, but as he
was unidentifiable, and had nothing to say apart from this, I cannot say
who he wase
Thoughts are indeed the key to Sophia's HRR predicament. In the
Hale household, back in the Harlem days, nothing like 'fear, hate and
shame' seems to have passed between them, In fact, her reverent silence
about the Hales seems to indicate a happy period, before violence black
and white hit the New York streets. Sophia was earning good money at
that time. Her relationships wéth working women were perhaps the deep-
est she had, though none of them are recorded heres Mabel returned from
her bakery at dawn. It must have been a strange mênage, and I have a
feeling that Jack felt close to Sophia as he had never felt close to a white
before. It was a revelation for him, his first introduction,@too, to
Europe, or rather the Mediterranean. He possibly was never aware of
Sophia's affair with his wife. I am certainthis affair happened.
It was what built up this nightmare pile of thoughts om Sophia, just
described, that made her feel hatred of the husband, and his hatred of
her in turn. At the same time I believe he went on thinking of her as
a close friende She inuariably asked t husband in such a situation,
Do you mind if I love your wife?, and the husband's smiled, Of course
not, sent an excited shiver down her spine, simce she really did believe
that he was condoning an affair, while in fact, for himself, he was


condoning what seemed to him the most precious friendship his wife had
ever hade I think Et Jack Hale saw the truth, and was forbearing about
it. He became one of the few men she admires, for surviving his hatred
of her. She felt enormous shame about coming between them-she hated
disturbing simple people. Yet these were the ones she loved most.
Jack Hale was one of those who "turned himself into a shadow* for her.
The ease with which the word 'shadow? enters the above narrative (see
page 1 J argues for me the presence of a dark skin, in the memory-
I wonder if another reason for her silence about the Hales, and for her
transference of their situation to the Aaron apartment (where life was
decidedly cooller) was not 'black shame' at what she had done to them,
though of course with Mabel's boisterous help.
Yet every moment was animated, poignantly vivid so that I remembered
it afterwards, the shame or the pain, as strangely and ambiguously pleasant.
How can I explain it? Nothach was wasted nowe Whereas before I had 'lost'


painful episodes, these new ones I regurgitated in the silence of my bed-
room and tried to spell them out. In other words I was beginning to feel
a destiny take hold of my life. Isn't that exactly a definition of purg-
atory, where the inmates enter voluntarily, burn themselves voluntarily, and
derive a sweet delirious satisfaction from their awareness that nothing of the
pain is wasted, but laid to the benefit of some mysterious construction.?
It was like all my past life being burned up. I felt that nothing escaped
te ote Aarms
REmA gaze /and, feeling this, I examined myself more minutely than I had ever
done before, to discover if the disapproval I assumed them to feel was just-
ified. And yet I cannot remember an incident where they showed me direct
dispapproval. It was always in a glance, a slight turning aways a truncation
of the talk. If I sang, I felt I sang too much and too loudly, if I didn't sing
I felt I was being colde I am so naturally effusive, I know as if from birth
that the simplest gestures-a kiss or a warm hand on the shoulder--are the
ones that count with people (even when they find it a bit cheap), that there
was no danger of my old friends noticing the terrible operation going on inside
me. Thus their familiar glances were like those concave mirrors that take
in a whole scenek I could see my former self in their eyes, and discover howg
utterly distinct it was from the person I had become. Every tight my heart
welled up utth indignation at the accusations these two new friends were
glancing into me. I wasn't deceitfull I wasn't out for self-gain!
I wasn't a savagel And after an hour of this, sweating, I would lie back
and realise quite coollyf that it was I myself who had done the accusping,
that I was under the most acute self-examination of my life. My earnings
had gone down. It was so easy to spend half the day in the semi-darkness
of her bedroom talking to her, and half the night talking into the phone.
The hours melted into each other. As my earnings went down I began to
theu friends
depend on Ithem'more and more, to feel obliged to them! And this increased


my sense of belonging to a strict family whose investigations into my
humblest intentions I had to accept. He brought/new business contacts.
That doubled the obligation, which doubled the dependence.
He used to murmur to himself sometimes a Yiddish lament which for months
I could not understand-The Shechina is in Goluth! In such a voicel One
day she translated it for me, in a whisper, as follows! the Holy Spirit is
in Exile. I heard this word 'exile* so often. 'A people in exile, and a
God in exile'l It was natural, I suppose, that I should become an exile
with them, and like an exile call my life into account, and begin to wonder
on what values I could possibly base a life. It seemed to me now that hith-
erto life had simply been lived for me, the amalgam of various influences
I had never stopped to question. I began to piece everything together, espec-
ially my angusshed and ecstatic youth. It was a pleasure to remember, now,
tut my own past
an escape from my new theological austerities
H seemed
o ne
Imbonills eret
impossible now that I had been
carried through a Venetian calle
on the shoulders of gondoliers- -given the run of a superb Bermuda mansion
by a Dutch millionaire for a whole year* to entertain as I liked, at his
expense-invited to an intimate dinner by the president of a South American
republic after he had glimpsed me from his car (surrounded by outriders!).
It was like aeeing a masaic, its dominant stones gold and acquamarine-
tit
it played before my eyes,/so far away, so clear, so exclusively visual,
with all the accompanying sounds and smellsabsent. And at the climax of
that young life the shrewd, lazy creature who set me up in business, Cassandra as
call Ker.
K That woman, no longerso young, is at the top of my list when I am anywhere
near the North African seaboard. She settled in Tangiers when it was tax-
and ethics-free. She kept three or four servants, and water poured down
beads in the doorway against the heat, in the Turkish way. Her Bervants
waited for her to get drunk, just like Lady Hester Stanhope in her Syrian
garden, in order to steal her valuables. I did what I could to get her


out of it. Finally she fin anced the building of my island villa, and
settled in there with me. Whenever I appeared in Tangiers she staged a
heart attack, to keep me a week longer than schedule. Lying down with her
now I remember her huge breasts as they were twenty or more years ago,
always fresh from being handled by a young boy. At that time, it was a
fishing village. She had a marvellous succession of sailor-boys-I
mean marvellous because of their appearance, not the succession-it looked
as if heaven had opened up and released a multitude of new angelic
specimens-bright and blond or dark and wistful or firce and freckled-
and sometimes for two whole nights she would fail to come down to the
seaboard restauant, having too much on her hands. I am smiling at all
this, partly because it is all another life, partly with quiet astonishment
(triumphant too) that she should ever have wanted me, with this file of
fisher-boys and brothers of girl-servants to keep her senses fascinated
night and day. But I was young and ravishing tooma black angel, perhaps
a demon! That isn't quite the right description. Iwas compelling!
A derk, laughing forcel I sang, I played the guitar, I talked so cleverly
in any language south of the Alps and the Pyrenees that I won a rapt audience
at the snap of my fingers wherever I was. I was never witty. I talked at
the heart of things. I made people feel I had touched a secret spring!
But I could only do that if I had an objective: I mean if there was a
'promising* woman about. Oh I impressed, always. But given that 'promise'
I fell into supernatural hands, I was spellbinding! I might address every-
hut
thing to her husband or boyfriends, E still my message went home-all
the boyfriendsin the world were unable to save her from herself! Yet,
yet it was always me who paid with flames, while she found only the pleasure-
the kisses she had not thought possible before-the ecstasy of being loved
by a congenial and not an opposite being! When I see photographs of myself


at that age, when I hear the little amateur recordings of me dinging in
some fishermen's bar, I am astonished at the dynamic excitement it all
conveys, the promise of something that has not been known since ancient times!
People can hardly call me a thing of the future, given the kind of future
most of us envisage, namely the end of the world, but they can and do call
me ancient. They are used to polite exchanges between people, and the
domination of strong persoaality, but when I come into the rooml-it is a
presence that defies all the accepted methods of human communication, that
offers no news and asks for none, that simply-glowingly-throbbingly-
is, bursting into the flat and ordinary corners of life so that people dis-
cover what the full human presence is, and how far short of this ancient
phenomenon they themselves and their friends falll Now this isn't self-
flattery. It is simply what they tell mel Especially the wamen-all
but the flattest of women! The men see it too, from an amused, sometimes
frightened, sometimes hostile distance. Now Tom supposing this breath-
taking presence, which harks back to the Etruscans, the Phoenicians, the
Babylonians, supposing it gives you a kiss and closes its arms round you
and-finds you where you most enjoy to be found, what boy, what file of
boys, though released at that moment from the blinding bowels of heaven,
could dispute it for place? Yes, the boys continue to be beautiful,
she continues to dandle and dally with them, but the entire nervous system
has received a shock which sends a dislocating shudder down into the sexual
regions. The fisher-boys go on performing their pull-and-thrust
operations but the supporting magic has gonel Everything is orientated
towards me like the faces of the sunflowers to King Sunl
Yes, she told me about that womane I think I've even seen her.
How she had golden hair and lay in bed till noon. What she didn't tell
Cassandn's
me was that the fisher-boys continued to file to/" Rer bed, after her initiation
into the Sophian ecstasies! She missed that bit outl She said the boys


ceased. Now she tells the truth. But this truth in no way undermines
the power of those Sophian ecstasies, as she might have thought once.
After that kiss, snatched so suddenly in the kitchen, not only my body
changed but my husband's too. For she made me need him more than beforel
And I can well understand that the golden lady needed her fisher-boys more
than before, having been so perfectly stimulated! My husband found to his
satisfaction an increase of fervour on my side at a time when he thought
l6o me
such a thing physically impossible. Unknown to him, his attentions/now simply
completed an act already started in his absance! He no longer stimulated
mel (Lovely contradictionsl) That was not within his power any more. I
was already stimulated! The magic had already begun working in my blood,
and his performance was like a dénouement, neatly wrapping up all the earlier
intimate fervours into a curtain drop. The more he excited me, the less his
value to me became. And I call that the work of an exalted creaturel
We have often called her a witch since,but of course we remember ber in
our heart of hearts as a pre.eminently clean creature-her teeth, her
nails, her breath, her fine skin. Yet when my husband calls her 'the
marriage-breaker', I agree. It is no more than her destiny- I have seen
it happena dozen times, the marriage-breaking, but still something exalted
is going on. What she fdid to us, and I suppose it did break our marriage,
in the tissues of the love, had something expansive about it. As a matter
of fact I think I now hate her. She lied and did us a great deal of damage.
She poured scorn on us in her endless talking sessions with her polyglot
friends. Yet I have to repeat, against my will, that the element of exalt-
ation was never lacking. I would like to destroy her, in the sense that I
would be happier if she were not around, but I know I would be destroying
an exalted force, and that I would have to pay for this even as Phineas was
denied access to the holy regions by the angels after he hackilled Zimri and
Kosbi.


I wonder if, when she says that, she remembers that she knows about
those angels through me alone, her husband? As a matter of fact, God
allowed Phineas in after some debate. Phineas had simply been an executioner.
Miracles had been worked so that Zimri and Kosbi should be found in flagrante
dilecto. She knows, my own wife, that I do not hold her blamelessi Perhaps
I should have played Phineas with them bothl Leah had eyes that were tender,
and I belteve the Scriptor could have added 'tender with sorrow*-the sorrow
of a people defiant in captivity and weak in prosperity! This sorrow has
always been in my eyes! Is that why she-the name Sophia is like the
breath of death for me-called me patriarchal so often? It MEASAE wasn't
entirely my bearde My wife is right that I did not clearly know, in the
gentile way of clarity, that she (my wife) came to/straight from the arms
of the other one-hot from the other one-at the very threshold of sat-
isfaction because of the other onel But my body-the body of my race-
saw it. My sorrow saw it. And when I spread my skirt over her as Boaz
did over Ruth on the threshing floor the joy was compounded with something
that burned at the heart, that intensified even the joy because it was the
to my arif
opposite of joy! I could no longer say/as Boaz did to Ruth when she lay
at his side, that everyone knew she was a virtuous woman. Until then I
had thought_of her as a kind of Ruth who had come to her God relatively
late, having lain with gentiles. And like Ruth she was now 'the fulfilled
one', and as brave as Ruth because she had lived with her moth/Naomi until
I came along, and as blessed because she disregarded 'the young and the
rich' for me, for her own people. She gave me fine children, late in my
lifel She quickly discovered that I am one to call myself a Jew first
and a male second, a Jew first and a husband second. She knew the kipd of
sacrifice that meant, and perhaps her father, thepure man, prepared her for
ita Now, when she came in to me again and again, after that third creature
had engtered our lives, it was like a second marriage-a pleasure so un-


tamed that the marrow of my bones was all but sucked out and I felt a
century old afterwards, aching and perplexed, as if I had done nothing of
my own will but in a deliriously thrilling way been used. The ancient
sorrow in me told/that I was enjoying something like Solomon's good fortune,
that was no good fortune in the ende She was a harem for me-Solomon's
dusky Phoenician, and his Egyptian princess, she was the lovely Ammonite
who gave birth to his heir, she was a hundred desrt-nightsl She was hot
day too, she was frankincense and a budle of myrrh, a cluster of camphire
in the vineyards of Engedil Her breasts were two young roes that are
twins, which feed among the lilies! And why should I not have taken this
as my due? Why, even if she came into me straight from the hands of some
not
other force, should Z/engulf her again in the hot night of the race?
Otherwise I would have lost the race, in all senses! I would have left
her to the other's triumph! But in the end those burning nights counted
on my behalf, against all the stimulation under the sun, even the King Sun,
and my finalising act in some way rescued her from what had gone before.
Does she remember Sohpia- - -remember in the sense of reliving? Have I lost
my place? I see she listens to me less than before. She used to have
an alert way of looking up when I spoke, as if just my voice transmitted
urgent news from the sacred lande But now there is something dry between
us. Dry as old men's bones. She listens, she beguiles, she traps me delight-
fully with her neck that is like the tower of David, suddenly presented to
me in a doorway, her lips a thread of scarlet, her temples a piece of pom-
egranate within her locks! Her slim smile draws me into the darkened room.
But something austere in the state of Israel has gone-the king has laid
up gold and silver, and taken many wives, and the great days of Saul are
over, the king is now superiog to the people, and the Mount of Corruption has
come into being, where the altars of Solomon stand, dedicated to the abom-
inations, Ashtoreth, Chemosh and Milcom! Solomon has touched too many
women of other faiths! I touched her too-the other one- -through my


wife--breasts that not minutes before had been shaped by her hands--I
mingled my sweat with hers, the one of the foreign faith, the idolater,
the unclean onel And yet we survived it somehow. Only she doesn't
listen to me like she used to. The tissues of the love were atrophied.
Oh we discuss this quite freely between use We ask each other, Did she
succeed in breaking our marriage? is that life we had before stillborn
between us now, even without our knowing? In certain moods we say, No,
it is only because the children are grown up, ths marriage no longer
serves its earlier dynamic racial function. The marriage is now disturb-
ingly like a love affair, it has the coolness with ardour of a love affair!
The delights are snatched all the more hungrily because the protagonists
are no longer intimate to each other. I am in a way (and in a way I
could not bear to admit to anyone else) a broken man.
The above is perhaps the least expected narrative in the book.
Aaron is after all a self-sufficient man, unswerving in his faith, not
on a quest like the Mother Superior, much less Sophia. His needs are
simple, he and his books (I mean books like the Talmud) can cope with most
of them. Compared with the others he is an unanguished creature. Yet
here he is talking about "freakisoussions' with his wife about Sophia.
And the marriage all but broken up. Just through her thoughts? That
they talk about Sophia is obvlous-averyone does anyway. That he felt
some of his wife's desire towards Sophia is possible, but
desire was
not yet clear even to her in the New York days. How could they freely
discuss what in any case balongs to dream and daydream? and/awakening
plans of the heart, never spoken? I can offer no answer here. The
only possibility is that another similar matter is dividing them-not


Sophia (though it could hardly be anyone like herl). Has Jack Hale's
voice suddenly made an interpolation in the Aaron narrative? Possible,
because, below, Sophia answers him indignantly. It sounds like an old
lament. She goes on to say that she tried to borrow 'five grand' from
him. This certainly wasn't Aaron. It is difficult to imagine it was
Hale either, because in those days she was making money enough. Yet,
further below, Aaron's wife defends her husband for not Rmiana lending
her what she wanted! It is in such details that I really have to give
up, and ask the reader to indulge speculations of his owny which might
be more subtle than mine,
Why, did I break youl did I break your rod? I never touched youl
Did you not need to break perhaps? Was I not simply the instrument of
your being broken? Do you remember me coming to you, and sitting my
kingly (yes, kinglyl) throbbing presence down in a chair close to yours
in your little library ((Aaron had none in New York)), and asking you to
lend me five grand? And do you remember saying-this was the wealthiest
period of your life, by farl-How can you ask such a thing? It's ime
possible, you said, you know thatl-with a big wave of the hand which
made me feel you were lying as NO MAN HAS EVER LIED TO WOMAN BEFORE,
with a hot sincerity of expression of the kind that usually goes into
love-making!
And,t, as his wife, can tell you categorically that he did not have
the money. He had just been through an expensive operation. You
yourself were at his bedside so often-you ought to knowl You purred him
back to healthi You talked his work back into him, gave him the will


to live, knowing (from what I had told you) how deeply talmudic he has always
been in his conviction that it is better not to have been born than to have
been born. And then you and I went back to the apartment and we put on


loose clothes, and gradually I found msyelf hoping that he would not
come out of hospitall Isn't that the work of a fiend? I only woke up to
it later, when I saw the fear in his eyes, months later. And it really
is true what he says, that the race saved me--it saved when I went into
him the first time, and it saved me a second time when I saw that you were
putting everything in peril, and that the race might be vanquished in him!
I am quivering at this moment either with fear or indignation. No, he
hadn't the money to give you. And as you told me much later, you were only
putting him to the test by asking him for it. We only put such testing
questions to friends when we hate them! Deny that you had come to hate
him-but you overlooked that this meant hating me too in the end, because
he and I arerlesh of flesh and blood of blogat Yes, I was Ruthl My name
was 'the fulfilled one'l
You catl You slim-lipped mewing femalel Do you think you did nothing
to me? I didn't see hatred in your eyes when you looked across at him
sometimes-yes, at him? Do you think I didn't realise that you wanted
to be titillated back to an interest in your marriage bed, which was getting
stale? Do you think your hands never wandered? You touched my buttock!
we had just come in from the theatre, the three of us, or was it ballet?
I seem to remember Margot and Nureyev. We were strolling into the kitchen
for a bite before going to bed, I leaned forward to get a cup and your hand
was not simply touching my buttock but
laid coolly on it, for seconds on
end, radiating its measage that we were to change our lives henceforth,
and that we sere no longer to consider ourslves in his baggage-train!
That was the first move made. And later that night I responded by planting
a deeper kiss on you than you had ever thought possible. If you are trying
to say that you preferred to go into him (or whatever your jargon is) in an
unstimulated state you can say it in a hundred languages, Hebrew included,
but no one is going to belyieve youl Where the bee sucks there sucked II
The place smarted and swelled and demanded many assuaging attentions!


I was the one who provided them so I ought to knowl And many were the
times you went into him delightfully tired, long past the point of stim-
ulation, with a modicum of pleasure to give, but all the better for that,
because you could bide your time and control matters, you little hedonistl
If you are quivering with indignation, so am II
If I may come in here again with a few facts as opposed to emotional
theories, may I say that at this time he was far from being able to afford
one grand let alone five, having a large family, shaky investments (he
called me in for help, so I know), two apartments, not to say a villa in
the Mediterranean (at least he had just bought the land and had paid the
first deposit to the builders), and the upkeep of her, the ungrateful onel
And he was by no means a healthy man (which made the villa an urgent nec-
essity). But like so many of his race he bore his sorrows as if they were
a yoke of pbeasure, and undertook, as I have done in my life, every one's
welfere except his owne I believe they had a pleasant household, the
three of them, for a time. But Sophia sét about dividing theme Precisely
as she tried to set me against them both, at their own villa, by frowning
me out of the housel Truth like murder will always out.
I called myself a broken man. But I am not a broken Jewa Whatever
shame my wife now feels is due to the.guardian of the covenant at her side.
How could S. (I will not say her name) have destroyed that? She heard me
praying in my room every morning, but did she have an inkling of the power
of the prayer? Did she know that at times she was benefiting from the
prayer, when it was dedicated to her health and good fortune? Did she
know that she burned as in hell afterwards (I mean when we had slpit up)
because the saving grace of my prayers had been stopped, and the flow of
Godly attention to her turned away? She only needed to dip a little into
rabbinical literature, into the Talmuds of Jerusalem and Babylon, to find
out. But she never had the pattence to read. She never had the substance
to be alone. And without that you cannot be a Jewa Had she read Jesus


(I mean the worthier Jesus, son of Sirach, who wrote Ecclesiastes) she
might have found something within her scope--prectical advice on how to
live-yow to hold the tongue and how to be wary of women (imagine her
trying that!), and how to eat, with the mind first and last on the Lorde
It is better, Jesus son of Sirach said, to hear the rebuke of the wide
than the song of fools. But she preferred the song! She sang
herselfi The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart
of fools is in the house of mirthl I might add thist a certain Rabbi
Hillel, a Pharisee, once said, In places where you find no men, be a mane
Where I have found fools and singergand mirth-makers I have been a Jewl
I have stood my ground! Where I have found renegade Jews I have been a
Jew twice over, jubilantly sol And this is why S. came to me, just as my
wife had come to me years before, because my first and last loyalty was
outside the grasp of men. Yes, she found the touch of 'other loyalties'
in my silences, my tall build and my powerful shoulders, in the shock of
what she once described as my. "prophetic hair', That was her way of dis-
covering me. It enguléed her life, it changed her as nothing else had
done among the fools and the singers! And that she undid all the strength
accruing to her from this (in exchange for a tumble on someone else's marriage
bedl) goes to show that she belonged among the singers after all. She
was not chosen. For there are chosen. Only the chosen themselves
know that to be the case. She proved that whatever else she was chosen
for-and we are all chosen for something-it was not the way of the
Lord.
I could answer this if I hadn't just been sick. My belly seems to
hote Han ever before
have been torn out of my body and yet be there H REIT
heavier than a mound of flesh ever weighed, writhing, bleeding acpa tears
that drive channels of fire through my guts. This is my little monthly
price for being a woman. They come more fiercely now, the blood flows


more profusely, as if to show that the woman is in the ascendancy.
Indeed I feel a softer creature than ever before. I skrink from fights,
even the verbal ones. I shrink now from answering this home-made prophet
with his cracked record about the race, which is like a man bending down to
look in the lavatory pan all the time to calculate his evacuations. Thank
God I have met Indians-who when they talk about the Race mean the human
creaturel That, I believe, is all the answer I want to give him. Sick
as I am, deep in the bog of unenlightened flesh, a groaning thing, I can
give the answer that drives to the heart of the matterl Also I can never
believe that scratching in the Old Testament for texts like a hen scratching
for grubs constitutes any sort of godliness.
I see that while she has answered him (with lavatory talk) she hasn't
answered me. But being sick she probably prefers the theological to the
biological argument, just to get her mind off the body. I mean that her
hatred of my husband was something like a biological force, it exuded from
the cells of her lovely sking above all, it was so deep, this hatred,
that I could not tell whether her miraculously soft movements, when all
my flesh seemed to melt under a new sun, were a caress for me or a caress
of hatred for hime I am describing it badly because such an intensely
biological feeling can hardly yield itself to the mind for description at
all. What I mean is that each touch of her hand wasbimultaneously hot
with hatred for him, but not only this, it was all the hotter for that,
it had all the more of a forbidden quality. Naturally as fast as I rose
her
to these touches, the more I succumbed to hatred of hims those touches
carried rebellion in them, thrilling and secretivel I am only able to
say this because
touches are in the
for me
and I can think
past
now,
about them. My hatred of him ended when her touches ended, showing me
its existence only by ceasing. They ended slowly, I mean those touches
with their encapsulated hatred ceased to infect me only slowly, after we
had separated. He must have seen it, in the hospital, where he was for


the second time. How can I describe her touch? Her lips were a delicious
fruit wherever they were planted, on whichever part of the body. The
sense of hot summer ruit just plucked from the tree summarises the whole
of that New York period for me, turning it into a distinct and separate
lrut
experience, not really realted to the other love of my life, a which I
even
yes,
remember/now with immediate biological responses beyond my control, even
nowl The shame he still sees in me is simply the shame of these fierce
biological states. Far from being shame at what was once performed in his
absence, it is shame at what is being performed now, in my body, and which
his body is unable to compete with, let alone satisfy: this, nearly two
years after she went her ways! That I hate her, that I spend hours talking
with him about her (mostly as a witch) has nothing to do with this sudden
biological infusement which takes ne like a hot blast of air.
I too remember, my darling girl with the hips and the legs of a boyl
I remember how your subtle suggestion that an altogether new kind of
earthly experience was possible between us worked, divine catalyst, on
our fevered bloode I remember the curtains, closed, as if they were
the complete expresston in their folds and ripples and tough hessian surfaces
of the variety of our inventions. I remember the merciless damp heat,
the decptive air-pockets now and then that made the curtains billow
heavily for a moment, offering the hope of cool air, but only more hot
air was the result: and this was its own delight too-that it made the
sweat pour even more freely, until the vast bed was soaked to the mattress,
I mean the air's lack of comppomise or finesse was ours too, as the same
hands searched the same tremulous routes, and the voice sang the same
brute praisest
Enough!
A woman said to me once that I rendered all the men she had ever been
with ghosts, and quicker than anyone has been rendered a ghost before.


She told me too that for the first time in her life she felt her own
flesh and blood. Hitherto, she realised, she had been a walking observatory.
As I turned her men to ghosts, I turned her from a ghost into a live creat-
urel Her bosom sprang to life-this is only what she told me, she was
flung back to the time of her first experiences, in puberty, when like all
of us she had wanted to cry out, "Mother!' I cannot say I know what is
meant by my body, what destiny, perhaps what new species. I only know
that when I lower myself-spread my skirts over them, as Aaron would say-
a wild world, all astir, envelops them of which my actual physical appear-
ance (though arresting enough) gave them not the tiniest hint. They gasp
with surprise, yes! Stare up at me with mouths open, eyes aghast!
This then WEES sex! Do the husbands wonder wn that something is planted
in their women that grows like an orchid, rendering them more desirable but
less accessible as time goes on? Call me fiendi I pursue my function!
I think perhaps I am what men used to be once, before St Augustine and
St Benedict put their literary and intellectualf seal on the male organr
I think of the men of the Alexandrian deserts! After years in a cave
a Thedlaid anchorite glimpsed a passing woman. He rushed out and told
her that he could satisfy her enough for ten men if she gave him a trial.
went
They eusher to Alexandria and lived together for six motths. I have
something of that urgency in me, always. My thirst is that of the desert,
the burning natron lakes, there lies my Rke* firel The women recognise
it in me-the hot glistening eyes in the slit of black cloth, accompanied
by the unabashed Bedouin stare of the malet They are astonished at my
skin, which seems to have inhabited a land of brooks and water, of fountains
and depths that spring out of valleys and hills, along the banks of the
Nilel And my stomach lying in folds, a softly rippling Buddha belly!
And so when I lie myself down there is something hotly racial in me (it
doesn't matter which race, or which mixture, only that it is a Mediterranean
least
compound), and since even the mast polyglot of us have races in our blood,


these leap to life in the women for the first timel The desert bursts
into flame, and the phoenix rises! Therefore the heat of New York was
particularly appropriate. While everyone was gaspingand running in and out
of air-conditioned cinemas and restaurants, and speeding out to little
lawnefronted places in Connecticut, we at best laad to stroll down to the
delicatessen to get a change of air, and no one could say we were paler
than anyone else, though we rarely saw the light of the sky. And I know
one thing, that if precisely those same circumstances prevailed again,
and he was in a New York hospital again, and none of this verbal confusion
about witches and the seed and all that garbage had taken place it would
be the same today, she would feel today what she felt every day for two
whole months.
What she says is true. I can imagine it-to my shame I do imagine
it, though I bear her no love nor even the mildest respect. Yes, the fire
of the desert! the merciless and yet consoling firel Those shimmering
distances, the uncaring silences, the ruffled dunes and the footsteps
smoothed away in a moment, the fierce encounters in black tents! Some-
times, on a hot afternoon, I am alone here at the villa, wondering what new
was
deserts the future will provide. Yes, my imagination bas-been stirred,#
and once that happens there is no more rest from the yearnings and hopes
and anguished hungers! Or perhaps there will be no more deserts!
And so I look at him sadly sometimes. There cannot be two of her.
I mean, not in one person's life. Oh, Sophia, how I love you!
Should I come to you then? I am clearing up some last-minute
details in Cambridge, Mass., and could fly this evening, as I so often did
before. And you could pick me up at the airport as you so often did before!
And before taking the ferry from the mainland we could stop over one
night at a hotel, as we So odten did beforel Oh what rapturous inventions
will the gods devise nowl
This is the way you put the offer to a hundred women in every part of


the globe. I can resist your voice over the phone, in letters! Your
presence is what I cannot resist. And you are so fiendishly unpresent
here on the verandah, so stridently not there in your wicker chair where
you delighted to make your crackling noises, calling attention to yourself
and to that voluptuous globe of flesh yofu sit down withl And you
never
kere
will belagain, because none of us could overlook the wounds we have served
each other with, the words we have dipped in vinegar and plunged into the
other's sidel Only if you were present now, about to lower yourself on
to the divan in that narrow room with a window going on to this verandah,
the thin curtains drawn against the sea-breezes that drift through the
Moorish arches, against the jubilant yellow glare of the sun which must
not see too much of us because that is the business of the gods! out of
earshot to him but sufficiently close to him to make your hatred of him
potent and dangerous, hot to the point of fainting ecstasyl only then,
spangled, could I fail to resist you. Otherwise I almost prefer my
desert-memories.
As a matter of fact, with the belly HR torn by wild horses in
every direction I would rather be in my own bed than lowering myself on
to yours. I have my own destiny, after all. I à am not just here to
serve either you or the 'hundred' woman all over the globe. At this
moment my belly is a foundry of unsuspected changes,
perhaps
divine ones, though I dare say your hooror of anyone claiming access to
the divine must reject this at onces Yes, I know your abject level of thinking!
laying of
I know how the Talmud and the ritual baths and the Kera and the/tefillin
go with a view of the human creature as plunged in lay darkness-
What?
Yes! Tutored by him you plunged me into darkness. You allow us
light, divine light, only if we get a big success in lifel
Good Godi


Yes! I've seen you shake hands with the powerful, mixing awe
with resentment (the resentment serving for later, when the powerful's
trousers will be taken down in secret!). I know that this was one of
your reasons for keeping me dependent on you, so that I should continue
to writhe in what you suppose to be my natural darkness: the darkness of
every creature, your own darkness! For God shines from outside in your
world, not from within! He punished, helps, advises like a damned lawyer
in the skyl And we are all supposed to be crawling in his nether region,
is it his Arse or something--
Ohl Fetch her down, Adoshem!
But you cannot seal me from the light! In my world we all have hopel
This much I learned from your world-to understand Christ's mission for
the first timel Yes, my children, you threw me into the arms of a Jew,
but it was Christ! For the bounties of God, as Clement of Alexandria
told us long before Christ had been degraded into a household name, are
'for the common benefits'! You can plunge the spear of words deep into
my side, you may steep it in vinegar (an apt image of yours, did you
realise its connection with that "lesser' Jesus or did you never read how
they nailed him to a cross?), but only flesh is maimed, and flesh is as
grass, and he was never crucified, he was never nailed to a cross, for
do you think it possible to crucify God? I know how brutally you take
everything I am sayings if you cannot see God in each and every one of
us, how could you see Him in Christ? That 'mixed-up kid" as you once
called him, that "little Jew calling himself the son of God' as your
husband called him-you think he was enclosed in his body, his seed,
his shit, in the darkness of his own evacuatory processes, as you see
all of us? Let me recall you to your own Kera texts, where it is
written YE ARE GODS! Wan*t you realise that Christ carried your God
to the rest of the world, and left you only with the seed, the body,


the shithouse? I am crying my eyes outl
My dear child, while my wife may think like thatt I never coulde
But
Indeed you are right about the text. / How could Christ give our God to
the rest of the world, much less take Him away from us? By your own ar-
gument He cannot be given or taken away, bartered or crucified. You
should learn to 'do and hear' not 'hear and do* as the Bible says.
Oh Gottenu, Gottenu, you are close and near, a friend, a father, most
here and everywherel Comfort ye my people, comfort ye with mel
If I may come in again here-I intend to keep out of these arguments
as much as possible, except for brief factual interpolations which who
knows may be found useful-her husband and I had a long tete-d-tete
on all this, man to man, unknown to either of the women, and I must say,
aside
talk atee, that the reality is very different from the verbal exaggeratéons
we have so far heard.
May I suggest what you do with your silver-knobbed cane?
If I may go ong(t like to be brief and to the point), his wife was the
victim of a lesbian infatuation. Yes, I know that plain talk hurts but
it heals in the ende I mean too her infatuation, Sophia's, not the wife's.
Now we a all at some time or another, at school or in the army, manifest
what could be called a homosexual interest-
Good Godl You too? Is that the reason for the silver-knobbed cane?
-or perhaps I ought tosay that we have all been drawn into some
kind of homosexual situation through the lack of proper outlets, hence the
likelihood of its happening at school or in the army. Yes, she, the wife,
may have shown a passing interest. But her memory exaggerates! As for
Sophia, I believe she has a hopror of being totally naked. She clings
for dear life to the fig-leaf, so to speak. Island-birds have twittered
this to me. Now Aaron maintains that this is because she is simply a woman
trying to be a man, and is terrified that Hone day she will be found out to


have only a woman's parts. It seems clear to me that there is some
kind of psychological repression or even schizoid tendency going on here.
The grotesqueness of such a reltionship must have struck the wife as soon
as the first moments of her confusion passed. I asked him had he ever
suggested an analyst to Sophia (we were speaking together in quiet, meas-
ured tones), for 'I believe we can all learn to live with our sicknesses if
we allowes a trained man to examine them'. I forget his answer. It was
something like "who wants to examine a witch'. Witchl Yes, I suppose
there are people with some kind of occult power, exercising an hypnotic hold
on less resolute people. It would account for the wife's interest in her
(I won't put it higher than that). Aaron even said she had put a spell on
him while he was in hospital back in the States! Of course this is his
humour. But apparently he found it impossible to get out of bed weeks
after the normal rest-period. Perhaps he felt her devilry only because
he was in a weak state. Anyway, reason is once more in the saddle and he
how
can/talk about it all quietly. It is simply no good rushing after the
first feeling you get headlong, and upsetting everything round you. The
ironical thing is that one only learns control towards the end of one's
life. I remember the fits of rage (though only when I was provoked)
that rocked my nervous system in the old days. I never in my life felt
the impulse to hit anyone, but I think I have hit and thrown through the
air more chairs, beds, desks and resounding objects of glass or china or
ceramic than the inventory of three houses could account for. In the
end balance prevailed. And I learned not to take other people's selfish-
ness to heart. I remember when one of my sons was late for a meal-
five minutes is as late as five hoursl-I threw the - platter at
the centre of the table, full of lobster and boiled rice, to the floor,
and then smashed a glass door as I slammed it closed on my way out.
Now I have learned to live with lateness as with most other human failings.


You simply cannot imagine how difficult it was for my wife to get people
to apologise to me, on an occasion like that onel My son almost had to
be dragged along to my room, where I was waiting at my desk. And always
kad
some excuse! This time it was that he/found some woman who had fallen
in the road, and had driven her to hospital, and--this being south of the
Ieat
Alps-they cross-exminaed him for an hour before they would acmit her! wounds!
As I said to him, Have they abolished telephones then? -fou could easily
have telephoned! But people won't think. However, as I say, I have
learned to live with selfishness. And I believe a great instrument for
the achievement of balance lies in the works of Sigmund Frugd. I have
heard him called 'thebreatest of Jewish poets', and I must say I do find
poetry in some of those serene analyses of the dark figure who stands
behind us and casts his shadow on all our actions! Constantly our society
(and the family is an embryo-society) is threatened by that figure lurking
in the unconscious. History is a chronicle of our failure to master him.
I havehad wounds enough, but my conclusion is that dwelling on them only
doubles the hurt. I try to forgive and forget the selfish actions that
made me lose my temper. Perhaps those people who perpetuated those
selfish actions are aware of what they did now, for they too may have
achieved their balance. I cannot say that this is true of my son, or
of any of my sons, who are hooked not on reason but on other products.
But at the end of everything lies death, we slip back into forgetfulness,
so why cannot we eat agree with each other for the shert term of our
existence? Why not make life pleasant for each other? I have heard
such fierce arguments in my life, you would think art and religious
beliefs and such like were the basis of everything we do instead of the
comfortable reflections that follow a well-fed stomach! First let us
get harmony between us, and the security, first the question of our bread
and butter and the roof over our head, and the newspaper that will bring


news of the outside world (I regard these *chronicles of present time'
as indispensable to balance), then we can get down to discussing these
other rarified subjects, and so long as we still have breath for them.
Autthen we have to face the unpalatiple fact that our discussions will
alter nothing! The world has an annoying way of repeating its patterns,
though I agree that a good discussion does clear the air, sharpensbur wits
and perhaps bringlus nearer an understanding of our own weaknesses and
potantialities: Also I believe that some kind of religion is necaessary
to hold society togethera It provides a moral code, and protects a man
against the insidious feeling that he does not have to account for his
actions. Having said that much, I am obliged to add that I am as con
fused about this subject as everyone else is. I believe the world must
have been created, and that therefore some sort of guidance is taking
place. I don't believe we go to heaven or hell. I don't believe that
Christ was the son of God, although he was certainly a very good man
(indeed, a great social reformer, in his way). The trouble starts when
people claim to know. I mean when they start saying things that cannot
Vergied.
possibly be verffeede Calling Christ the son of God is a good example.
And immortality: well, it is pleasant to think that we do not in fact
die, but it cannot be demonstrated as easily as the fact that we do diel
Who pis there to tell us what lies on the other side of the terrible
dividing line? I think perhaps I know why people spend So much time
in ardent discussion about imponderables. It is fear. They don't want
to fac e up to the dismally obvious truths. As that greatest of Jewish
poets said, if we fear death above everything else, is it not natural
that we shoudl erect a God above everything else, even death? Fear and
hope are the keys to our dreams!
But
L pehind these dreams lies the real world, with satisfying reliability.
We may find it ordinary and dull, but we slip back into it with a sigh of


relief after our incursions into the never-never land of exaggeration,
where the cerebral mists prevail which are the outcome of sickness!
This is why I advised an analyst in her case. I see a severe-a di is
locating-departure from reality in her case, into the dreamworld of
erotic fantasy, the megalomania of sexual domination. For those who are
not artfists, and she is not one, it is better to root the sickness out,
and leave the exaggerations to people who feel obliged to spend their
lives writing or painting or composing the dreams that rise from their
hopes and fears! I repeat, there are known facts. We know where the
liver is situated, we know the function of the kidneys, we know the paths
the blood takes. Have you seen two doctors pondering on the position
of the liver? There is no discussion on these thingsl And one day we
may/able to extend this certain knowledge into every field including that
of dreams, of art, of all the secret hopes and fears that predestine
(usually for the worse) our actions. The staggering journeys into space
that are at present being undertaken offer hope that this will be so, not
in our lifetimes perhaps, but for future generations. Yes, we shall reach
a time when we need not go to the artist or the priest for authentic
descriptions of the dream areas, but have text-books at our disposal,
and experts, professionally qualified men whose word we can doubt as little
AS WE CAN THAT OF A TOP DOCTOR. To whom does Sophia run when her nerves
are worn down to the point where they cannot support her organism any
longer-to the doctorl Why did not she not fo it before? and begin
where the trouble started, in her brain? Life, happily, is in the end
very simplel
I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream. Methought
meto oughr Ikad-
*WEE it was- a ton of New York Herald Tribunes on my head!


((I cannot say who is speaking here. The wit is quoting from Bottom's
speech in Midsummer Night's Dream, where he wakes from having worn the
ass's head. For my moneys it is Josh, the Renegade's 'hoakedyson,
and he is having a dab at his father, whose reading of New York Herald
Tribunes, foreign edition, is well nighf religious.))
A loving pupil called Porphyry once collected his master's lectures.
The master, being an Alexandrian, saw with Greek and Jewish and Edyptian
eyes. He said, If the eye that tries to see be dimmed by vice, impurity
or weakness, then it sees nothing even when someone else points to what
lies plainly before it. And the ecstasy of the angels could play before
you, my darling, and you would see no more than the glitter of your silver-
knobbed canel But then that is the level of your ecstasy. The -
transmutation to direct knowledge is a matter of infinitely slow growth,
and
and
through many births, disregarding space er time a generation, which are
the convenient fictions required most desperately by people like you,
and in varying degrees by everyone.
Who spoke?
Where is she?
Which one do you mean?
And her husband? How have I wandered among these thoughts?
Everything seems darkness. I cannot hear or see the otherse There
seems only one breathing creature, of which we are all the impulses.
All difference, which belongs only to the body, dies away and leaves one.
I feel frightened! There is no one else alive-because we
are all
alive but only as ONEI Oh Jnani horrorl I want to awake back to the
worlde Let me have their voices again, though they are my enemies,
that is enemies of my flesh (as I am tool) Oh how I understand the
gentleman with the silver-knobbed cane- Ahis need for reason, for wife
and comforts! I need the voices to be able to go on with lifel


One or two may plunge into that silence, the darkness-the blinding
lightl-of ONE CREATURE, but not me. I see how far I too have chosen
the earth-am a poor devil-then how did those thoughts, those lines
from Plotinus, come to my mind?
((I am uncertain who le speaking here. It could be Sophia.
But the word "Jnani indicates familiarity with Indian thought,
which rules her out, as it rules out Aaron, his wife, and certainly the
Renegade. On the other hand, I had the impression that it was Aaron's
wife who talked about Plotinus. But we should not be surprised if one
person talks the thoughts belonging to another. My guess is Sister
Mahatma. If my hunch is correct, it is a fascinating revelation indeed.))
I think it was Aaron's wife. It was a voice disguised by feeling
(we are all disguised by feeling!). You could hardly say man or woman.
I think it was the wife of the banking gentleman, the one wth the
silver-knobbed cane.
But she never speaks.
Let us have our voices back-it makes me feel at homel Better
than this darkness! The damp New York heat-the fevered fingers-the
sound of her body, the suck of the sweat, she spangled-give me back
my sins---better than unrelated silence, unconjugal stillmess!
Who spoke?
Still the silence.
Still the surrounding darkness.
I the strange one, alone, as it will be at the end of time,
remember the gespel according to the Egyptians, when Salome asked the
Lord how long death would prevail and when His wisdom would become known,
and He said, When ye have put off the garment of shame, when the two
become one, and the male with female, there being neither male nor
female.


((This is definitely Sophia. She will now take up her doctrine gf
gender again, using Valentinus as her launching pad. And if my guess is
right a God-Almighty row will break out.))
And I remember the Gnostic Valentinus, another Egyptian, his explain-
ing how the vast mistake of the creation came abouts long before the
creation, God (NOT the creator) sent out from Himself manifestations in
pairs-male and female. Each pair was inferior in quality to the
previous one. Sophia, the female of the last and thirtieth pair, feeling
the loss of her separation from God most poignantly, began to love Him
too passionately and was flung from the divine harmony into matter, and
the universe was created out of her agony. She gave birth to a son,
the creator, who operates this valley of sorrows. And she was rescued
by Christ, who came straight from God in order to perform his tender
services of light.
I think again and again of that Sophia as my essential self, flung
deeper and deeper into matter, whirling steadily towards the light, and
finding Christ.
May I address something to you-whoever you are in the darkness and
silence? a proposition, to turn something over in your mind and reach an
unavoidable solution? In a cattle-shed, which are the animals for


slaughter? Which are those due for castration, fattening? The males.
Which are those kept for milk and progeneration? Which are those for whom,
even in hundreds, one male will serve? The females. Looking over a pig-
sty, which of the creatures are due to be smoked, cured, minced? Not surely
the SOWS with their multiple nipples gorged on by the tail-waggi,ng newly
born! In war, who in their millions are poured on to the screaming battle
fronts, to be launched against the scathing rod of fire? who design,
master. operate the rods of fire big and small that constitute this white-hot
battle front-its guns, rifles, mortars, long-snouted howitzers? The
But
males! Azal who are those who crouch from the spouting rods of destruction
dences
war
(notice how the rod-form dominates all thef instrmentsof destruetion!),
who hide their young under their arms, who go among the military rest-camps
with their comforts, to lick the wounds and offer themselves up to assuage
the rod of soft flesh that now pants for its delights after the fearful
steel arguments of the night? Not, surely, the males.
I am told there are many more females than males on the earth, and
I ask myself is not this because they have been preserved, they are the
very souls of preservation. That is my proposition. You may ask why
I come down on the side of the females, having argued that male and female
are to become one. You might as well ask whlz I am excited by her fertile
curves when I have those curves myself? Why not admire the rod, of which
I have more than a hint myself? Why does the female in me not enjoy the
male? I wll not have the fool's answer, that I belong to Sappho. I
hate the company of these people with their dark unwholseome eyes! But
perhaps I do sppreciate the male-through the femalefi I mean I never
associate with a lone woman, never the spinster-type. She is always
married, or has been! She is having, or has had, the rod! Now I see
the rod through her. I relish it through her. I enjoy the feel of the
male hand on her body, I am electrified by its recent presence! Even
while I am discrediting the male I am, enjoying the way he has formed her


l00
flesh. Remember--her flesh! I am aware that she will return to him,
and I would not want it any other way. Thus I discredit the very force
I am using. There is something perhaps mystical about that. Sveral times
I have even begged a woman to stay with her husband so that a certain bio-
logical part of her (which admittedly I do not understand) may be satisfied
sufficiently to ensure her concentration on her strange adventure with mel
Therel Touché! In that way, though I have never calculated anything in
my life, she will never more come to me for what legitimately belongs to
the poor ejaculating rod. At first she comes to me for what seems sex,
and them stumbles on the divinel Not that she touches the divine in me
(I am beyond flattery on this point): she finds the purring animal, the
night of primordial desire, as never before, And through that first
forker,
acknowledgement of the magic roots of life come, suggestions of the
divine. She stumbles on that sorpia of Vahentinus, mother of the creator,
in her love and agony! Sometimes-it happened only once-she advances
beyond me in understanding of the divine, and tries to take me with her.
But I am tied to matter! Horrible word "matter', stillborn child of
Newtonian sterility, dead to the magic, the electric. genius of the created
world with its endless intimations of perfection! I remain as a reminder
of God's material manifestation. Reaching the divine beyond life we see
that everything is divine in lifel This is why I claim that my discrediting
of the male has something mystical in it, while I lack totally the mystical
faculty in myself. I am shifting the way for the divine ecstasy by see-
ing his rod as its chief enemy. I see a woman crowned at the head of
creationt She is commanding all the sorrows and the festivals! She
is bathed in darkness and in light! Her laughter is heard across the
sky, she has the universe in her womb and her names abound!
Another thought-and let me say it while: the others are away.
It is that sex is towards death. Only in appearance is it towards life.


lel
This is seen in noth young and old. In youth it, debilitates (gradually
the spiritual faculty, in age it ruins. Its attendants are anger and
inner strife. The more an epoch concentrates on the sex part, the greater
Islam,
are its warse Christian doctrine was unable,like MBXXXXXM0XXXXuxxeskigkang to
contain the sex part. It simply tried to turn a blind eye. It offered
no method. In marriage, during the feryile middle period between youth
and ge age, the sex part becomes a powerful biological force in the grip
In tar middle panied,
of the reproductive process, i engulfing the entire system. mhether or
not a child is allowed to be the fresult, the organs achieve a union as
devoid of individuality as
human flesh ever achieves. Those in
capable of familiarity never experience it, and cannot imagine its exist-
ence. It occurs between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five, I have
only been told all this. You may laugh at it. I have no means of ver-
ifying it. But I believe that truth is a matter of direct apprehension,
the flash of recognition, and I must say that in a flash this was revealed
to me.
Before and after the ages of twenty-
five to forty-five the organs realise only with difficulty this fiercely
complete biological union. The fact that I am saying this without knowe
ledge is also proof (for me) that someone is gui7ding me, and that I am
an incarnation. If we but knew it, we all are.
The death-suggestion of sex is especially graphic in youth. The
wildly tupping child-couple look out of their closed dome of sex in despair
ies tai
while the frequent emissions rob the/young body of E primal energies of
teir
will and imagination, I would say also/primal ecstasy. That infinite loak
of the eyes is eclipsed. And if in later life that look returns it is
because the violence of the reproductive period is over, and the sax-elimed
begins to be saved for the soptasies again! Therefore is not sex towards


death?
And are you not round the bend? Sex releases, purifies, halts the
teeming self-involved brain, and by halting for a few moments even the
metabolism renews the bloodi Have you seen a woman-starved youth?
Do you realise to what fruitless yearning he is condemned? and the
fumbling shyness with which he responds to the female when he has managed,
against all odds (for lonely yearning hardly makes us attractive), to
find one? Do you know (but how could you?) that after being vouchsafed
these pleasures of which I have never tired I feel light and free,
disburdened of anger, of war, of all the things you lay at sex's door?
This was undoubtedly the Renegade. For him sex is a normal and
continuous activity which with luck' will continue into old age. His
great enemy is "repression', the Freudian condition that is opposite
to sexual self-expression and which breeds unhealthy mental patterns.
Naturally he finds sexual satisfaction better than sexual starvation.
He perhaps does not see Sophia's point, that
sexual desire has to
be mastered for ends that go far beyond the matter of sdeisfaction or
Heand Sophia
starvation. L Thy differ in the question of whether a more or less
o desirable
constant state of sexual desire, going well into old age, is natural/
But I may have got a false scent here. The above statement could
have been made by a large number of people, including Aarone The
monk never existed in Judah, after all. The Jewish family is already
a religious unit. Aaron's religious austerities do not include the
curbing of the sex impulse. But it remains that the curbing of the sex
impulse has been a dstoipline, perhaps the key discipline, of all
mystical effort from east to west. The Renegade would regard this


as pre-Freud and therefore invalidated by 'later knowledge' or something
wesfem
of that sort. He subscribes to thejidea of progress, not to the eastern
idea of a gradual loss of radiance and power from a perfect beginning,
a loss that takes many hundreds of thousands of years. No, for him
religion hag naturally withered away, as 'unverified knowledge', before
present-day certainties of science, our epoch of 'self-liberation'.
Yes, husbands steam with anger against mee They watch their wives'
need for them decline. And, on the wives' side, an incidental and
selective eroticism takes the place of tenderness. Their (the men's)
desires increase with this-precisely as their resentment of becoming
a slave to their wives' erotic whim increases tool Subtly, without
calculation, I have eclipsed the grand reproductius passion and reduced it
S MEEr to its proper thrust-and-pull mechanics. And in this
operation I produce, out of a couple, two creatures closer to a common
was
sex than either were before. This is why my women are mostly in their
middle age (always have been), when the illusion of childbirth has E
ceased. Renounce all and you shall inherit all was the way Thomas a
Kempis put it.
The rod is the instrument of flesh-reproduction, flesh-enslavement
and Flesh-destruction. ((sister Mahatma? It could, naturally, be
Sophia. "Flesh-destruction' here could mean two things--the anger
over-sexuality promotes (Sophia's argument), or the destruction of the
flesh in the form of ecstasy. achieved by sexual self-mastery. The
second would be much more Sister Mahatma's field.))
Big words for a little pleasant dallying! ((The Renegade,
certainly.))


1o4
Not always pleasant in its aftermath, or even in the dallying.
It is war, my dear! But what warrior fails to look back with wonder on
the field of destruction? Who hasn't found ecstasies in battle?
((Again possibly Sister Mahatma.))


Jo5
I have brought husbands to an extremity of despair, as they watch
their wives begin to lead lives of their own and consult me on all points
of work and honour (yes, a feminine honour is discoveredt), and to breathe
secrets into my ear which no husband may hear, even the husbands of others.
I have seen the most tender males crack into frantic martial dances under
the strain of losing an ally in the house. My attack is at first open and
direct, even frankly brutal, I mean after the first introductiong. I
glare at him, appear to take everything he says even on astronomy and the
datepf the introduction of Arabic numerals into Christian calculation as an
innuendo against me. As a matter of fact, I have stated that badly.
I really do feel everything he says as a scorching innuendo, I really do
burn with it for days afterwards! Hearing his voice at the lunch table
(yes, I invited him myself) I have to retire to bed to let the fire rage
itself to ashes in my solar plexus! For all these things pass through
my body! I have said time and again, haven't I, that I am an earth
incarnation? You, whoever you are, must not think that I operate
mentally in my conquests. No, I am torn and engulfed, quite as much as
the husband! After all I am turning her into a traitress, myself into
a destroyer and him into a--but what the devil do I care what happens
gory
to him? I see myself drawn down into the apilcy arena every tidm the
woman surprised at herself, too much in my hands to feel any responsibility
Ker
towards Ha man, watching herself with pain as she performs Lady Macbeth
without having Macbeth for a husband, or indeed any pretext at all for
murder! But there is definitely murder in the housel And I have
brought 1y1 When I say that I turn her into a traitress, myself into
a destroyer, I ought I say. 'myself into a murderess'! On one occasion
I held a dinner party for men only, or rather with only one woman present
apart from myself. I included her husband among the guests. She had
just begun her night-wanderings as Lady Macbeth! I invited local


1o6
hunters, it was here on this island, I mean those undistinguished,
usually small, rough-sfinned men who smell of sweat and shoot little
and
birds, sometimes (though too infrequently) each other. Yes, you feel
the venom mounting in my blood, eh? I had a great wooden screen door
set out as a table on trellis legs, and we ate a banquet of tiny birds,
dozens of them cooked on spits. Washed down the gullet with a rough red
winel Only one womany and her tender husband as the 'outsiders", so to
speaks he/willowy, goose-fleshed, nodding and simpering cipher! And
'his* woman serene, robust, settled in her place at table like a queen
(incidentally just crowned, only a few days before, by myself, a fact
of which the cipher, grinning in his marital compaacency, did not knowl).
And--a lovely touch-I was well aware that one of the hunters, a
particularly quiet man usually, with a stutter, but now garrulous under
my influence, was in love with herl Well, 'in love's he wanted to
spread his sweaty skirts over her a little, that's alll And my mag-
netic influence on him was such that for the space of that burning
evening he lost his stutter and said again and again, his glass raised,
that a certain woman in the room (there was only onel) deserved all
he possessed or ever wished to ownl fhat he had lost his head, irrev-
ocably! fhat he sould sing her praises until first cock-crow! And
every time he spoke I made a mock how-dare-you movement towards him,
my faun-frown black, and my lips curved in a faun-smile! I even
raised a chair over his head in burlesque manner, while in burlesque
manner he ducked, layghing. And gradually-but what anage it tookl-
the gloating cipher of a husband understood, and his face began falling
into his clown's boots, and all the triumph of his wretched shunting
rod was in an instant wiped outl Was that shunting object as large as
she claimed? At this moment it couldn't have been cooked for anybody's
dinner, it would have disintegrated in the waterl Let me pause, to


allow the fire to rage to cinders inside me. How long, my child-creator,
how long?
Yes, I have tortured a man with all my heart, and then borne the torture
in my own bodyl Once, when the bfight had died down, and my triumph was as
complete as it ks ever is with me, I saw a husband as an incarnation, and
realised- almost blaming the woman the dust of whose feet I took every
day) that I had been dipping a spear in vinegar and planting it into his
side with something like gaietyl Whom they wish to destroy they first
make blindl-and how many times, then, have I been destroyed! And does
that Jew say I don't suffer, not like Catherine whirl on the wheel?
I am doing so even nowl
1 a I a A
ax E
HESE Yes, I saw him
bathed in light, almost I felt Christ, as if he had been there in this
man's flesh on a second mission, while she was enjsying the fruits of
all I had been doing to him! In extenuation, really I ought to add this-
the women, even if they looked at me shocked for something daid or done
to their husbands, even as they said, But why do you behave like that,
he hasn't done you any harm? closed their arms round me and smiled not
forgiveness, no, forforgiveness would have shown the crime, but grateful
condonementi It must be remembered that many women, especially the
gifted, seek a deep Arevenge on their fathers which they enact on their
husbands!
When the Jews went to live under the Ptolemies in Alexandria their
Jehovah was admireds But He was too inaccessible, and rather bad-
tempered. This is why Christ, the author of our lives, came to mediate
for Him. ((Tte Makar Supanir?))
Who is saying this for me? ((Sophin?))
My stomach-what raptures and sorrows I am giving birth tat(Dfinilely
Sophin).


1o8
Well, let me speak first. I dislike to see anyone suffer and
therefore I must return to my briginal suggestion og an analyst. If
this is where the 'supreme Jew' has landed us, after centuries of war
and recently the cruellest racial decimation of all timet in his name,
then I think I prefer to think of history as without him. I realise
that, despite my having been baptised a gentile (but how does one eliminate
the Jew-with a little water?), I realise that I know nothing what-
soever about Christ, and indeed never gave him a thought. Again I say-
get thee to an anlyst, gol
least
At/he MT that no water, even all the created oceans, will un-
make the Jew. I 0 wonder is he even circumcised, the sonel renegade?
In this much I agree with him, that her outcries and her inner burnings
hardly recommend her Christ, and as for Christ being the author of our
lives- Witches make an outcry! Witches burn! Witches are moved
to do things they cannot understand and which they later may regret,
witches are blinded, words are put in their mouths, they dance to the
devil's tunel And they are a feature of Christianity! And Joshua said
to the people, You cannot serve the Lord, for he is an holy God, he is a
jealous God, he will not forgive your transgressions or your siginsl
You are mocking the woman in me, you stiff-necked pocket-Aaron!
Your religion never had an Isis, a Mary, a Mother Kali, a Siva, a
Lukshmil Your sky was always so bleakly malel And this is why the
Supremem Jew is I call him stretched out his hand to your women, and
was in return adored by them, because for your race they were naturally
inferior to mer
It was always well-known Jewish doctrine-"His home, meaning his
wife'l
Having a daughter was regarded as unfortunatel


lo9
So it is in Christian Italy today!
And as for Jewish doctrine, this also says 'A voice in woman is an
immodesty*! Far from submitting to this, Christ spoke to the woman at
the well, he spoke to whogres, he reasoned with them, he heard the obscentty
of their voices with joyl And I do believe that both you and your wife,
you pot-bellied old cunt, see no more in my outcries and burnings than a
little disturbance of your order, the order-the precious order that
makes you the lisping servants of sciencel I remember your grotesque
little homilies on the first moon-shotsl How we were all going to be
bigger and better people once we had hopped on to other planetsi And how
the earth was too small for us--imagine what largesse of heart that
argues! What a small thought, what a mean insensitivity to these marvels
I see all around me each in depth, in the depth of their magic, and not
like you as an inventory, a numerical accumulation of faded objectsl
The earth is small for those who are small, the earth is dead for those
who are dead! And all the flights across God's universe will not enlarge
them, or revive them! It will make them smaller, deaderl Yes, how you
want to order the sky, you who would show less forbearance, less reason,
less impartiality than myself (even myself), under dire attack. Look
at your forgearance towards mel Look at the 'reason'l Listen to the
wordd that fly around-witch, goy, she-devill Tou'ch you anywhere on
the raw and out flies reason by the windowl
Anyone who wishes for the highest must avoid all company good or bad.
Who said that? ((Hell, almesk anyme sxcept Sophiaite Renagode?)
#ett, Whoever said it, you have never managed to avoid company for a
minute of your lifel
Ah, she is back again-that slim voicel Was sde asleep? Did she
die? How burningly delicious your little wounding shaft feels as it


enters my side-yes, I remember you saying it in the Harlem apartment
before we ever thought of my closing my arms round you, or of your break-
ing open my Muladhara, the lotus of my sex, and drawing teersl-I remem-
ber you saying to me, On the rare occasions when you are with just one
or two people, sitting quietly, even then you are writing letters!
((This was of course Sophia. Again an Indian term, "Muladhara', So
perhaps I am wrang about the earlier unknown voice which also used an
Indian term (page 64). It is easy to underestimate the reading Sophia,
because of her demonstrative physical life. She will suddenly devour
a book cover to cover in the twinkling of an eye, with no one noticing.))


THE SOPHIAN MAP OF LOVE
These warring thoughts intensify with the island's heat (it is
August). On the mainland there is an outbreak of cholera, but no one
seems to think it possible that this spotless island could be infected,
with its sewage system from two centuries ago, and its coast-line coated
with the dumpings of vast oil tankers that pass far out at sea day and
night. War in the atmosphere, war in the sea, war in the mind! I
cannot help thinking that Sophia is right and we are preparing a new
biological specimen, and that this daily war we wage on the world round
us (which means also each other) is, like the war of our minds, simply
the tormented gurgitation of old forms, obsolete now, and the germin-
ation of new ones-not even a new race perhaps, not even biological,
but a new life requiring no physical realisation, no space-time formula
at alll We have left the invisible to look after itself for so many
centuries that it has exacted its own revenge, and made life on the earth
impossible. No wonder these 'last voices', as we might call them,
sound tormented, at war with themselves no less than with each other.
The most tranquil is perhaps that of Mr Renegade;
he simply sees, through his newspapers, that Athe world is going from
bad to worse', and the whole defiantly mystical problem that made it so
has never once occurred to him, let alone tormented hime


Aaron is taken ill. Now his fevers are entirely due to the imaginary
situation his wife has found herself inl to the thoughts he has been in-
fected byl to the imaginative conftuotions he has built on the basis of
his wife'sl Here, then, is a physical end-product: no event, no affair,
no overt love. not even an implied or suggested love, between his wife and
Sophiag but it is 'as if' it had all happened, and his body reacts with
violence against the violence of his own thoughts, precisely as the cholera
derived from the violence of river- and sea-pollution. His body now requires
rest, to drag the mind down from its intense state so that infected thoughts
may become properly absorbed as "knowledge', in the same way as his anti-
bodies might destroy the cholera. Thus his destiny moves that much closer
to its talmudic end of detachment.
'He is ill again', Aaron's wife says below. It seems that she is
actually writing one of her little notes to the Sophia villa (later she
tears it up).
He is ill again.
What? Are you writing a letter to me, after so long?
Yes. He fell into a long sleep, in the bedroom leading on to the
verandah (the large room, not the narrow place where you and I had our
afternoons, with him not ten yards aways beyond the curtains), and as his
breathing was even I was reluctant to wake hime He devaloped a fever.
The hospital has him under observation.
Oh my slim, insulting onel
There are flies everywhere but I managed to get him into a private


with
room and am bribing the Mother Superior lay promises of a possible en-
dowment in our wills and so one There are masses of fruit on his
bedside table. You know the hospital inside? Its gardens almost
give on to those of the Renegade, the shattering white building you and
I saw together from the ferry-boat, that first day, gleaming like a
fortress, with the sleepy convent tucked behind it. I believe they're
Franciscans. But they could equally be Dominicans. If they didn't
for
talk so much I might even take them/Trappists.
Be careful-wulgarityl But I find myself laughing tool Those
laughs we used to have, with the sweat pouring down our sides in Harlem?
They seemed an offence to such a terrible epoch, a pulling of the dark
gods' beardsl
The fever is down and his tired little eyes are beginning to follow
the best of the nuns round the room, so I know he is on the mend. Of
course he is horrified to be in the hands of 'mumbo-jumbo practitioners'
as he calls theme But he softens under their Marian smiles. They know
how to give his pillow that little pat which imparts peace. He told me
today that the 'brides of Christ are a filthy lot on the whole--unsteril-


ised instruments and bedpans everywhere. The flies are terrible as I
say but the insecticide they use is worse, they never seem to have heard
the word carcinagent. He reads a great deal and his wonderful hair falls
to his shoulders as always. He tries to pray but they always find an
excuse to interrupt him, and he is doing it in silence nowe These are
in any case, he says, the best prayers. The doctors have picked up the
word virus and use it to explain everything, the Latin for 'poison'l
Still, it replaces 'germ*, which sounds old-fashioned. As he recovers,
his eye begins to linger on me with a more definite looks Why does he
recover so quickly BkxKaME in hospital and not at home?-
I am layghing again!
The same treatment is available in both placesi I à can't avoid the
impression that fe feels safer in hospital-
Splitting my sidest
I don't mean because doctorsand emergency treatment are available
there but because he is not at my mercy therel Yes! Yet at home I fly
round him, I bring him what he needs faster than a dozen nursing sisters.
With better care for hygiene too. He knows all thisa His third hospit-
alisation in how many years? Is it altogether accidental?
Lovely irony!
I think the lingering look he givesjisn't entirely awakening desire.
Yet it is too. There is suspicion and mistrust. Even a glint of fear.
Do you know what he fears? That I mught not help him on to the road.
And even I share the fantastic idea! It makes me do more and more for
him, squeezing oranges, rushing to the pharmacy for what the hospital is
too mean to give him, washing and sterilising. In me too desire has be-
come mixed-with this other thing. It has given the desire-on both
sides-a sharper edge.
It seems to me that he ought to cast off the garment of shame finally.


After all he can't go on doing it for ever. No wonder he gets fevers.
You tell me that-whose hands have almost grown to the shape of the
parts you have touched!
I'm two or three decades younger!
And increasingly activel
Why, does that thrill you slightly-?
No, I never want to see you again, and I already regret this letter
I have written you, so much that I shall tear it upl Yet I hear you in
the silence, your husky voice, complaining, beguiling, reminding--and
your hands, how I remember them, the electric charge that cracks from
them!
You call it electricity. I call it something deeper without a name.
Once the kundalini has been awoken, the climax ceases tobatisfy,
though desire may for a time increase.
((Again the Indian term, meaning the coiled serpent of sex that
can be stamped into the flame, and the flame rises up the spine to become
ecstasy, so that the world is at last encapsulated in the perceiver.
Whose voice this is I cannot tell. At this stage I feel I cannot rule
out the possibility of intruding voices from hundreds, even hundreds of
thousands of years agol))
Sometimes I would like to know what has happened to the world, and
take my silver-knobbed cane like a sceptre and call for orderl A general
discussion as to what we can all do about it before it is too late, I
mean before The Bomb drops, I mean a political discussion to iron out
all our differences, they are surely not too great-this is what we need!
I had an interesting man to dinner, an annoying sniff and globules of
sweat on his upper lip but I suppose he can't help that, who said that
women dominated society in the last stages of Greek civilisation and


brought about the final disintegration of that society. Now, if I
ask myself truthfully, can I make a single move any day without consulting
my wife, I mean my wife's pleasure, the answer must be no. What has
happened to us? Take Aaron's wife. Sometimes I think she got him into
hospital, I happened to have taken a stroll up the hill (of course since
Sophia moved out and built her own villahe have been as thick as fleas
together) and I saw an ambulance draw up outside. I stepped back into
a bush (literally) and watched while they fetched him out on a kind of
sit-up stretcher. Yet not two hours before, in the morning, I had been
discussing this water-question with him-I'm after some of his water-
supply, he has something like a thousand litres a day coming from one of
his springs, and I get very short in the pdog-days, I mean for irrigation
purposes. He was as bright as a pin! Now sometimes a woman can appear
at the salient moment in a man's life and distract him. This sniffing,
sweating chap at dinner seems to be quite right that our world is wrecked
by the same fevers as the Greek world in its last days when no city-state
could agree with another and the spirit of independence was too strong
for the smallest cohesion to be possible for long, thus rendering inevitable
the Persian victories. Now the really Hellenic world did continue, he
went on, sniffing like a ferret, but at the hands of a foreigner, a
Macedonian, who set up a new city on the coast of Africa in his own name,
Aflexandria. He talked far too much, like all these academic johnnies,
unless they don't talk at all, but it was quite interesting. Somehow I
feel that she, Sophia, belongs to the Greece of disintegration. I feel
that these two women, she and Aaron's wife, are the expression of something
dreadful, the eclipse not even of a civilisation but a species. It is
revealing that they can lay an old patriarch like him, low. He went out
saying his prayers. I feel a nostalgia forI can't tell what, when


I hear him pray. My parents were hardly orthodox. It reminds me of-
and something clogs my throat, it seems too deep for mel And I want to
escape all this I've built up and rush to-where? Does the waman,
asked old sniff-sweat, not always take her revenge for childbirth when
she finds the man prostrate and near his end? I thought that was damned
silly.
((We should notice here that the Renegade takes it for granted that
Sophia and Aaron's wife are in some kind of collusion against Aarone
Where he can have found this information I cannot guess. He assumes
that they are no longer talking to each other, or at least implies it
when he says 'ever since Sophia moved aut and built her villa we have
been as thick as fleas', but perhaps I am misinterpreting that. He
may have picked up the idea that Sophia and Aaron's wife are seeing each
other, even secretly, but that seems rather far-fetched. He may also
have 'picked up' Aaron's wife's thought-waves, but he is not the sort of
man Ato spend his time doing that. Miranda, the Aaron maid, often
passes the Renegade villa and stops for a chat with theif girl. A lot
of information passes that way. He may have heard of the notes that
go between the Aaron and the Sophia villa, and assumed that the 'mênage
a trois' taRe FaRRSRe of the Manhattan days was still on. As to this
idpginary mênage, by the way, I have always thought that the Renegade
picked up some New York gossip about Sophia and the Hales, and transferred
it to the Aarons.))
Let me answer that straight away! When society falls it deserves
to falll Its fall has no other cause than the propensity to falli AlLf
the women do is tear the threadbare tapestry downs having been deprisment
deprived of their part in the weaving of that tapestry, they must at
least be given the pleasure of tearing it down when it no longer presents


a valid image! Perhaps they do it from a deep biological consciousness
that swift change is necessary---new invisible formations towards the
making of that PERFECT CREATURE the Greeks talked about! Not meals and
schedules and safe political speeches, the bogus ordered patterns which
have no relation to the patterns of the heart! Naturally a people like
you are going to push the women into the kitchen and the nursery while
your affairs are going welli You do it by promising them the divine,
but they never once glimpse itl Perhaps you were sincere, as a young
bridegroom, when you promised that, for the divine you spoke to her about
was in her facel Maybe the only glimpse of the divine you will ever get!
You saw the shining Isis in her eyes, but #where is Isis now in your debit
and credit columns? And your wife must pay for the divine gift you
meant to bring to her-by looking after your children, by trays of coffee
at moments of hard pressure (oh yes, these pressures you suffer, glued
to the telephone, when in fact you are just too lazy to make the copféee
yourselfl), not to mention the voluptuous services of the bed which,
come fair weather or foul, must be ready like an automatic street-
power
delicatessen. Naturally when your edaniention fails, when no one can
be enchanted any more, when your youth is in revolt (they compare your
world with the divine one from which they have but recently come-are
you too a platonist?), when yet another war accountable to your stupidity
breaks out, or business shrinks because you failed to master your greed,-
well, naturally the women come forward with knives in their teeth! You
yourself were obliged to play the two-backed beast in a Manhattan hotel
with a woman less than half your age, because she threatened to blow
your brains out if you didn't.
((The following is the story of one of the Renegade's adventures in
al Manhattan hotel. How Sophia picked it up I cannot say, since he only


told his business associates about it (some of them had had the same
experience). Can#f we be sure, on Athe other hand, that it really did
happen? Could it be a Renegade dream of love?))
That's true. She knocked on my door and I thought it was the hall
porter with a message from my runner. Blue Chips had taken a dip and
the Dow Index was looking green round the gills, and I was expecting to


hear the worst from Wall Street (I always am). And suddenly she fills
the frame of the door with the most unkissable mouth I have ever seen,
painted red like a fireman's hose, and asks me if I need anything urgent.
I said thank you very much, no, with that elegant shake of my head I have,
my eyes cast down, when I um dismissing somedne. But she stood her ground,
the door wide open, and said, You better hadda, honey, and I laf at anythin
less than a coupla hundred bucks. And she came inside and kicked the door
closed with something like a nazi boot. I tried to be quiet about it,
and remembered as much as I could of Freud's coolness of tone. But it
didn't work. I asked her why she needed to do this sort of thing, and
she simply made the fireman's hose form a great oval and stuck her tongue
through it. She even made me feel under analysis, Ather than yice versa.
I tried to be paternai but she asked in a flat voice, her eyes staring into
my head, if I had *kids'. Yes, I said, two girls and thpree male drug-addicts.
I was trying to move on to the parental-concern tone but she cut that
short, A couple of whores and three fags, she said. Then, Don't give
me that bullshit about my daughters and my sons, you should try playing
dad in a film, they need phonies like you. Come on, let's see your
bread, dad. And luckily I had the kind of money in my wallet that she
seemed to needa Another thing she said, You come from a generation of
whore-makers and fag-makers! And, Boyl she said, with a grim look right
in my eyes, are you going to enjoy this, I've got your "jole character
written out in my head like a book!
And you did enjoy it. You say nothing. Well?
I never told the wife a thing.
The one thing you nevertold her. A man who confides in his wife
is a damned fooll
She kept her boots onl I mean, she did everything for mel Here
was a virtual child teaching me all thr tricks I knew, and which I had


hitherto Faat taught others, but teaching me in such a way that they
appeared to me/newl And in a way that made me feel I didn't exist any
more as a man with a name and a business. Yes, I was completely lost but
by no means absent. Another creature was there, acting for me, far wild-
er than I had ever suspected myself of being, far less scrupulous about-
well, its choice of pleasure. I realised how much shame lay coiled up
inside me, little reserves that had laif like dead rats in an attic all
these years. I had always glanced hitherto in life, never really looked.
This tim e I looked, and found a pit of snakes in which I delighted. I
am not at all sorry to have had the experience. I don't mean because I
enjoyed it. The enjoyment was mixed, and in any case subsidiary to the
new hells my eyes were opened to. I saw perhaps that hell and pleasure
are not exclusive of each other.
And you gave her the two hundred bucks?
I gave her five hundred, and it crowned the pleasure I had had when
she didn't even thank me. She said she could have done one of two things
to me-killed me or seduced me, and for her one was equal to the other.
And I felt I had been killed. Her love was more a lioness's mauling than
anything else. I doubt if there was pleasure on her side. Her victim
was struck down by everything she did, just as if she were murdering him.
My eyes glowed at her as she left the rooms I asked her would she come
back some time, for a talk. If I came back, you human bidet, she said,
I'd only come back to kill you. And even then my eyes glowed. How can
I put it? I found more tenderness in her violence, in the dusgust she
clearly felt for me and the entire species, than I had known inanyone else.
I am frank with my wife in everything, but this one fact prevented me from
telling her. In the girl's disgust there was concern--yes, obviouslyl--
concern that a better creature should one day bepropuced! My mind began
emanaton.
to delve into the meek and stunted culture of which even crime is an PESE
RIE
And what did I count for, under her gaze, not to say under her


rough (but strangely delicate) hands? My debit and credit column, as you
call it, had come in usefyl, but what about the careful education at school
and university, the integrity I had always been taught I had, the convictions
that Athis war was right and that one wrong, that he ought to be elected and
the other one not, that a committee should be organised, a trust set up,
arrangements made for contracts to be filtered through to an in-law or a
cousin in need, all the daily engagements that made me feel responsible,
or rather demonstrated what I had always been taught as my undoubted
responsibility? All that fluttered to the ground like autumn leaves the
moment she lolked at me. It didn't even crash. A crash would have
argued a tall edifice. But here was just an old half-dead tree, not
worth the cutting down! She spent no time on shaking the leaves off-
it was the most casual thing in the world. And I discovered this other
Geature in me which had been there all the time and which wasn't responsible
or in a minimal sense ethical. Of course business isn't ethical either.
All those of us who are involved with it in a big way know that. But
as a business man you learn to live behind a veil, not a pretty one but
one that hides you. That is, in fact, the basis of doing business.
If you laid all your cards on the table at the birth of a tostnes deal
you would end in the bankruptcy court. No, it wasn't that she tore down
the veil, which is consciously put there anyway. She tore down an entire
civilisation. I mean, I thought we had a civlisation, until I realised
that in her lay real power, and in us just that degree of faint power which
comes from occupying a position acknowledged to be powerful! Do you see
what I mean? I realised to what extent I had won nothing for myself.
It had all been done for me by similar interested parties. The so-called
civilisation was just a kind of cowering-together of people without virtues
or aspirations or good dreams or more than perfunctory human concerns.
It was based on fixing yourself up, and staying that way. And this girl


was something in herself. She was by no means a civilisation, I saw
that, but perhaps she had a better, certainly more sincere glimmering of
it than I did, just by virtue of her disgust for my world. I had an im-
pression of new creatures being born in the wombs of thieves and murderesses!
And with pain, through thickets of error, finding again the way to-I
mote
dont know, a/direct life, where people live straight from their feelings
and needs, not calculating all the time like I have to what-he -thinks and
what-the-other-one-will-do, shifting and ducking all the time to avoid
that pitfall or this hanging beam, much of it imaginary. Yet-I know
what's in your mind-it hasn't made my debit and credit columns any less
lo me.
dearx In fact it made me realise that they are all I have! So I buckled
down to even harder work afterwards, and made those five hundred bucks about
twenty times over, before I left for a couple of weeks in Maine. Nor
has it fatered my thoughts in any way. I seem to be saying to myself all
the time, OK, the tree is half-dead but I do better on it than most other
men, and until you can find a way of cutting it down I am obliged to conclude
that no livelier plant exists. I notice that I am still an important man
for those in needs they despise me often enough, but my five hundred or
five thousand or fifty thousand bucks are useful to them. So there seems
life in the old tree yet. I see poignantly now how weak it is, deriving
its sap from barren soil, through dessicated roots. But I say, cut me
down then. Nobody does it. In fact I can't stop my phone ringing. And
the burden of the telephone message is usually, We need you, we need youl
Tell me more about her.
She painted her lips afterwards. I was surprised at this little
feminine attention. She also used some kleenez unashamedly, and left it
crumpled on the floor. She walked out without closing the door. I
heard later that a girl's gang was operating, that they were organised.


So she too was a slavel They covered all the hotels in the area.
I got a good many calls from business associates to be careful about
knocks on the door. There were jokes, hinging on the word 'knock'.
I chuckled obligingly (as they no doubt joked obligingly). In fact I
waited for another knock with bated heart, if I may use the expression.
I - cancelled my dinner dates. I mean the ones that didn't promote the
credit column. But there was no second visitation.
I never really liked this island. What made me suggest to Sophia
that I build a villa for her on the east side close to the hospital I
hardly remember: probably Sophia's ardent desire for it. It was five
years ago, just about thetime she was uncailing herself from life with the
Aarons, that long dark incubation from which she emerged well-nigh broken,
yet a grander and-for me-even more dramatic person than before. Her
hair had turned grey, she was heavier, though not slower, and above all a
certain inward grieving look had replaced the old one of almost wizened
anxiety in her eyes. I remember that look so well from years ago, when
she jumped about like a girl, her hair a gorgeous shining black, every-
thing about her so fresh and sweet except for her raging vitality.
That look of hers was like the perplexity of an experimental animal.
She just did not know about all the sophisticated machinations other
managed K
peoplej1 Alived siy yet she was wonderful at a business deal: she put her
aad
cards on the table in the most alarming way, tt somehow made the other
person feel that even if he made a fool of himself by over-buying, it was
hsiness
cn his side,
good, to have her gomtwitt I met her in Cambridge, Mass., God knows
what took either of us there. It was on the airport-Sophia always
makes a joke about its having been a pickup. But we were destined to
meet. I'm like so many friends she has--de-married so to speak,
in te end
no money worries. We would have met/anyway, as I'd been living on this
island, and/returned now and then to shake a few dear hands. I remember


now why I was in Cambridge (I suppose I like to block the period out).
I was recovering with a relative from my second marriage, to a British
plenipot in the Middle East who had (still has, no doubt) a ruffled, dry
face with harrassed eyes. His appraach to my body was simply frightening.
He zoomed down on me like a camera lens, his eyes fixed like black, poison-
tipped spearhaads on anything but my face, while he failed to do anything
very much except get beyand himself. When it was 'over', as they say,
he would wash himself down in the cool water that we kept in specially
flat
insulated tanks under the/roof. It was the worst thing he could do in
that heat, and it made him irritable in precisely the same way every time. Tre
umtalion
tken
Bt/ would last through tiffin (as I grew up to call tea) and/through his
two hours' office work in the foreign compound surrounded by dirty sand
and tinkling palm trees. He was a dear creature. We never really had
a moment's argument. We had plenty of good laughs, with something over-
done about them I admit. I used to go to his office sometimes. Every
car sent up magnificent white clouds of dust which drifted through his
windows, covering his files and telephones and secretaries like a soft
moonlight. All day skinny and silent figures in dirty loin cloths
tetetto playpfronk hoses on to the sand to keep it down but the sun was
humourously cruel-it dried at once what was wet, like Puck playing
tricks. This gave the dark figures a hopeless look as they stared,
hoses in hand, at every new arrival. I don't know why I'm talking
about this. Memories. I suppose it is to avoid talking about my plenipot-
I mean that's why I moved on to remembering the compound and the hoses.
So much has been written and talked about the love-making that comes off,
so little about those bungled and, not least, baffling struggles that take
place between people who approach each other with hoods over their heads
which
composed of forbidden dreams and the wounds they rose from, through/thay
don't even try to see the other 'person' -but what 'person' shouod wB


see in order to make love 'successfully"?-I ask this unrhetorically,
because I simply do not know, never having given or found pleasure with
either my first husband, a remarkably young army general, handsome, flushed
with outdoor living, his light blue eyes peppetually alive with a smile
and with healthy thoughts, or his ruffled successor. Where the "body'
comes in I never understaod. Somewhere it had desires, and-stronger
perhaps than straight desires--the hope of violating some deeply felt
authority (inside one) that forbade any contact. But once you were
naked, there seemed no more to be done, I mean even the desire disappeared.
So often my plenipot and I, once naked, would look at each with sudden
questioning surprise, for a second, as if to ask, what the devil are we
doing? before we buckled down to what we thought the other wanted, and
what I now recognise as other people's love, which we felt obliged to
other
imitate. It didn't work. Somehow or fether he achieved his schoolboy's
climax which never acknowledged a precise target but endangered all the
lace and glass in the roome It always happened like an opersight-
lorush in
you expected nurses/with towels, and alarmed relatives. Yes, I've
smiled since at these little tussles with the British Empire, as I call
them. I mean, he was tussling no less with the British Empire in me.
Empire stultifies chiefly the people enjoying it. I rerely smiled at
the time. I cowered and stooped and hung back, and everyone thought I
was charming and modest. They glanced with shight in their eyes at my
golden hair. And my huge bosom was a reassuring thing to have in any
company. They supposed that the plenipot and I collaborated in long
voluptuous operations through the fiercely hot nights-on account of my
appearance I suppose, and also because he was never seen at the 'all right'
brothels. He had no boys, nor whips to beat them with. He never walked
down the main street towards Bab al Muadham switching his gaze from side
to side narnowly, his upper lip shining with sweat as delectable loin-


clothed boys passed--as his assistant did. All my plenipot had was
my Rood was
his glass hood of dreams, all of them vicious ones, while/one of
fears. I understand those glass-hpoded creatures in Bosch (or is it
Breughel or both?). I know what it means.
After the divorce (my first husband had been killed in the war by the
way) I settled in Tangiers to recover myself a little, draw the fragments lagalter
that the last spasms of the empire had dispersed. There ('tax- and
ethics-free', as she always says) I waited for Sophia to visitf I day-
dreamed about us lolling in my easy chairs under the fans, to the deafening
scream of the muezzin through faulty roof-top loudspeakers at dusk and at
dawn. It happened about Athree times a year. I held her encapsulated
in my sun-fevered days, almost happy to see her prostrated by the heat
while I, who had spent much of my life in it, lay cool, gazing across at
her
her witha smile, forbidding/to touch another iced drink. I called the
money spent on our island-home 'empire money'. Sophia said with a laugh,
y mililary ma L 1
Let it be a memorial to the crucifixionf of te wives
glswingly
plasiten As a matter of fact, I used to talkja about these two 'splendid
men
vut
Sareenis for hours on end, under the fans, until
Grotkars.
she came to know them like Entanta She had a great ptaste for leaders-
MUOOMMERA army men and colonial governors and explorers and all that:
she seemed to forget they were male. I told her that I had caused these
Hat kad given
two men stmime more sorrow than they had caused me, andji gam/neither of
kad
them the children they/yearned for. There was something prophetic in me
(Sophia was already, in those Tangiers days, calling me Cassandra), and
even as a girl I had seen the fall of the empire clearly before my eyes,
while it still lay sprawled across the earth in tranquil prosperity,
before Adolf Hitler was known. Strangely, I foresaw it in the bedroom
most of all. I knew that everything these men I
= a guffawed with
in Cairo and Alex and Aden and Baghdad and Basrah and Port Said, everything


they said and did, even (go, especially) in the privacy of the bedroom,
was being caricatured by great invisible power-shifts of which they were
totally unaware. Their way of pronouncing English-their 'rarely' for
really-was always beautiful for me, I don't know if mine was for theme
What I mean is, I was alert to the function of accent as an indicator of
class and authority, whereas for them it was simply the way an Englishman
spoke. They failed to hear the reverberations of collapse in their
gently enunciated vowels, which had such an atmosphere for me of clement
summer afternoons on English lawns, and a certain interior kind of poetry,
rubicund, mellow, placid like the golden horses that gazed from their
stables. Their manners were memorable, in a Greek way-how can I put
it?rthey were the last English generation to be brought up on Greece,
it echoed in their behaviour, gave their faces a sometimes dazzling fresh
So mango Kam wete
beauty in youth (no wonder thn
scIR queans!). In the
first world war hordes of these dazzling creatures, fresh from school,
waited for death as if history had no further use for them. My men
weren't quite like that. Really they lived in the shadow of empire,
and perhaps they weren't deep down convinced that it would last. Besides,
oner
I 'kome
thete country] was black with industrial smoke, it was run by money, and
the moneyypeople had little time for C Greek youth and ta casual,
Hay wereir all charmiig ty any means,
mellow charm. Of course/
LanE The
mmenha-nfthe bad ones snarled and lashed. Their snubs were terrible.
In every part of the world they left behind them multitudes of awed,
loo
mortally hurt and rebbllious people. Funnys they were always admired/
by their most implacable enemies. Perhaps because they had a selfless
way of doing things, having been taught that even to be kicked around by
Thase,
an Englishman was a privilege for the kicked. Lfne bad ones, are those on
ona
whom all empire, in the last analysis, depends. When the bas/act, the
good are taught to look the other way. I saw enough * of it at the
officers' club in Cairo. Yet all of them, good and bad, kept their
worst behaviour not for Copts or Arabs of Nubians but E their own


countrymen, when they were of a lower class. I saw the desperate flaw
should
in this procedure, and began to think that all imperial rulers met begin
their colonisation at home. I saw, during our brief visits to London on
leave, that our accents were gradually being ostracised socially, and with-
out knowing quite what I was up to I began lowering my voice tn buses and
in the Tube. I was amazed, though, at how long the English tolerated #t
a I mean the workers who suddenly organised themselves into real pol-
itical unions for the first time in the second war, and brought the class
to which I allowed myself to belong down. Even then no blood was shed,
I suppose because the 'ruling' class (of course there was none, really)
failed to put up a fight. And why should they have fought? They
simply handed over the initiative to their American cousins, who they
thought would be flattered and beguiled by their accents like the English
were! My second husband always said, The Americans have taken over, and
after all they're the only people with enough power to 'do's it nowadays.
I was astonished at how general this feeling was among the very people
who had been lording it all over the Middle East, apparently without a
moment's doubt in their own authority, only months beforel But that was
what I had seen in the bedroom, even as a newly martied girl: their au
thority was inherited, it had not been won, and it did not go lower than
the skin, in the form of new dynamic ideas. All empire must fall, yuickly
or slowly, for that reason, I suppose. The whole class of well-spoken
Englishmen scattered like ghosts. Within five years of the war, there
were hordes of poor gantlefolk, and generals with only martial attitudes
left. One wouldn't like to see them rule the world again, not because
they did it badly-they achieved the first hint of glocal administration
with remarkably bland ease-but because no world rulers of any descript-
ion are ever wanted again. It is the ruling human being we want to dispense
we ae ale frea
with, and whom we see appear again and again. Sometimes I feel ttm


ho E3
TRTMIRISIIE CU
we are no longer ruled. But this is
grotesque illusion. I look across the harbour and see, about once a
month, the American cruisers, anchored offshore. I remember that people
like my husband by no means ceded their powerk
enmies the British trade unions. Not at alll Their zone of interest,
or rather profit, had shifted west, across the Atplantic, and like myself
leamed l:
imponal
thay/baskes in the new/power, flitting from Kansas City to Ohio and then
to San Francisco, west coast to east coast, ranch to city, many of them
in ordlar
(1ike me)/to watch their investments. And who is to say that their new
m *e A inide 2 t Atlanri
friends/ weren't beguiled by their accentsand their' Grecian manners? My
certouid
relatives 'on the other side" were/enchanted by
a He BIUIMEREINE MSIE VIMATIERRE MEE t aS They loved my quaint truculence,
which I had learned as an essential part of character. I exercised that
truculence in little ways for about twenty years after the second war.
Now at last I've given it up-I mean snubbing people with a sudden harsh
glance, disregarding an outstretched hand, keeping my mouth shut after
someone had uttered the forbidden 'Pleased to have met you', all the sorry
Social
the hypnotism that attends all power, anol is
bilge of a
I mean
pampisochoyanatissabdagpaxamxsisisupepEnary
wake up. Yer.
amcfumotins,
shared by ruler and
ye enchanted our servants and batmen
alike,)
for eas
and even the workers in the street! They had thom expressions)like 'a
proper gentleman'! They were in the hypnotic grip of a dream no less than
we werel In fact our roles were thrust upon us, by the white Englishman,
pegpls like
the dark African, the wise Indian! And how marvellous it was for)me to
lose that sense of hypnotism, only a few years ago, and live free-ah,
freel I am so free here, gazing down into the olive grove, with my Sophia
due in from the airport or the harbour, or due out-a dark messenger with
wings at her heels! I know that we are in fact ruled, controlled more
effectively than ever before. Yes, I am aware of the cruisers-I am
thank ful for them too, in case Russian ones take their placel I no


longer feel that kind of pride. I've become a sort of Indian, concent-
iin
rated on other things, aware that the body isibondage under any conditions!
And I also know that power has slipped from the human creature in this
universal twilight, and that presidents, kings, magnates are those least
aware today of having power. So when I feel I am exercising no human
authority, that nothing I say or do counts-that it has no a A
reverberations in other homes, in colleges or books or cabinet rooms or even
clubs! as it used to, I tell myself - that this is because the human
voice has ceased to reverberate, the human presence has learned not to shine,
and we have become so jealous of the smallest exercise of power that we
have rendered it utterly abstract, even if this will destray us, one and
all.
Yes, I retained my haughtiness for years after its function had
ceased-a shadow haughtiness that caused shadow indignation among the
shadow 'protesters' who now found it safe to come out on the streets and
lorg-sines
call for a new society, since the old one was already/dead! (You see how
the resentment is still me, even now? I would have taken up a whip in
the old days, had it been considered politic by our men for the women to
doso
use-thamt) But the haughtiness went together increasingly with guilt
(sumptom of failing power), =
esa
IERE AV and now thank God
even the guilt is dead, and my life "before' is as far from me as the
Roman empire. Ican hardly believe it
happened. How we all feared
each other reallyf The upper class the lower class, and vice versa, the
For '*ke haresiss tkat men do leave a Rakd tost hry tkaie ta did dacaine!
officer and the batman, the rich and the poor! K And are at last on the
Saphia
threshold of freeing each other? will the world come to an end, as thir
says? and wouldn't that be a fitting way of freeing each other? I mean,
perhaps life will be taken up elsewhere, in other biological forms,
our world history tucked behind the belt as primordial experience?


Only sometimes, when I hear those vaguely tender tones of a vanished
power (there was no need to shout, ever, the power had been so nicely
absorbed into the blood), I feel the memory stir. But I wasn't a EM
whole creature then. Power stunts those on whom it is exercised--but
much mors those who exercise it. My independence--a divorced and
travelling woman---seemed to coincide perfectly with India's!
((( It occurs to me that it might well have been Cassandra who
interpolated the Indian terms in some of the foregoing narratives, after
all. As far as I know she never went to India, yet she uses the word
'tiffin'. Like many people living in Arab countries she frequently
had Indian servants, especially Indian cooks. In another narrative
(not in this book) she descripbes how her Indian cook sits on the Far
floor of the kitchen all day, his eyes closed, dead drunk on arak, while
she does the cooking. For all I know Indian wisdom has given her this
impressive balance of hers. In a word, her life-long frigidity has at
last a function, she has found in it, through Indian thought, 'a short
cut to ecstasy'. The earlier cryptic reference pega 1 to the kund-
alini may, then, be hers. Who her teacher was, or whether she had one
outside the many books she reads, I cannot say. The phrase 'short cut
to ecstasy' is from another Anarrative, probably hers, but again not in
this volume.))
Thus I could not have been more ready for Sophia when she suddenly
turned up in Tangiers, years after we met. I think I taught her a lot
about Morroco, Tunisia, the desert-swathed world in which I had spent
so much of my life. She loved to hear me speak a Arabic. She would
turn her quick half-anguished gaze on me, as if to find out whether I
wasn't reallyan Arab after all. In her younger days she had this marv-
ellous gift of never bringing the slightest pre-judgement to a situation.


She saw things fresh like an animal. She absorbed experience like
an animal too. It simply acted on her nerve-ends. She remembered no
details afterwards. Sge forgot places and names with a reckless speed.
She never learned from experience, from what a friend of mine used to call
'the repetition of examples'. She repeated her mistakes with something
like grandeur. She didn't mind about that. There was no repentance or
back-looking in her-a tonic for me after a lifetime spent with people who
for every one step forward took two back, as if to wipe out the consequences.
Sophia plunged ahead singing, clapping unlikely people on the back,
ordering banquets in fish restaurants, quarrelling over the long-distance
telephone, dashing out in the middle of the night to swim nude or stand
nude in the rain, and getting her fin gers burned at least once a month in
some triangle or other. She told me about a Sicilian friend who once
pulled a gun on her in Chicago. It seemed so unjustified, and I burned
with hatred against that man. She had peapt out of the room like Vaslav
in Giselle', she said (she always called great men by their Christian
names). Years afterwards I learned that Il Tacco, as she called the
Stcilian friend, had a lovely Mexican wifel
When I first met Sophia she was living on the edge of Harlem--oh,
this was years ago-with a negro couple. They were called Jack and Mabel
Hale. Jack was a slim. moustached, fastidious young man who adopted a
high moral approach to everyone except himself. It made for some amusing
situations sometimes. Mabel was quite the opposite. In fact she seemed
born just to puncture her husband's moral fervour (which she projyoked with
always new outrages). She had a wonderful rolling laugh--the first thing
about her to attract Sophia's attention. Stories went round about her and
Sophia, I think. Jack knew about it, and decided in his missionary way
to let it 'burn Aitself out'. He was so devoutly Black, too, that he


left himself little time to study his wife's sex-exploits (they became
aspects of the black proplem, anyway), particularly as she worked all
night in a bakerys and he was at Columbia university (as far as I could
gather) all day. His intelligence a was of the political kind--inter-
esting and limited. He certainly predicted the black-white struggle that
came years Alater. He = ribbed Mabel for her lack of what he called
'black self-identification'. And Mabel's answer was either a clapping
laugh or a noisy kiss blown across the room towards Sophia. She once
described Sophia to me as 'like two big sisters rolled into one new doll
then the rasping laughter that struck the bare walls of their apartment
like thunder claps. "Sophia bent over double laughing at Mabel's game of
chasing her little son's genitalia. It went on every day. They adored
Sophia. They maintained that she looked negro, and thought and behaved
negro. I never noticed it. But I've stopped trying to account for what
people see in others.


TEhawece 135
hahely
Arabia
I Artre wit luis Seleu Pillan 2wisdar
I was fadsinated by French North Africa at that time, and took Sophia
with me on frequent trips to Philippeville and Algiers. We used to bathe
along
etthe deserted coast, which in those days was a blinding bone-white, =
the waves rolling in frothily under an empty blue sky, the sea a vast
sweetly bubbling blue desert, as if ships had not yet been invented.
Hac
and
I loved the particular not at all pretty atmosphere created by the French-
Arab connection, in which the smell of French cooking mingled with that
of cous-cous on the streets, and uncut French books stood out on trays
under sun-blinds, and the wine had an Islamic ferocity. I remembered the
king
same,, though much more refined because of the Levantine commerce being
done, in Beirut-the brothels, the cafés, the restaurants and even the
narrow Paris-like streets had an air of exquisite self-realisation, as
if they had found a perfect setting among the palm trees, to the sound
of the heavy surf, and the gutteral lash of Arabic, with the American
university cool and somehow faintly embarrassed up on its hill. I
preferred it to the Anglo-Arab love affair, which conveyed something am-
biguous, partly homosexual, and introduced little from the west apart
from rather dreary turf clubs and officers' clubs and press clubs,
little islands on which a grimy sea of Arabs lapped. The English were
in any case so much refugees from their own country, to whose industrial
wastes they could not belong, only profit from. Their approach to the
Arab world was moral, flavoured with Greek curiosity, self-indulgent too,
drugged with a sense of inner luxury, kingship, which the Arabs never
fail to convey in the most barren conditions. The French influx, on
the other hand, was a practical one. It was real colonisation of the
kind the British never went in for. They brought vineyards tended in
Hat ed
the French manner, restaurants serving Parisian food, and cafés/spillta
was
on to the pavements, under awnings, as ff the talk inside tart-beceme so
it way
animated that it had pushed/through the doors. And then the bookshops,


dusty and musty, the pages yellowing soon from the delving implacable
sunlight. And that seaboard near Phillippeville where our voices were
snatched into the marvellous blue solitudes, with the dusty road behind
us empty as far as the eye could see, with that final and impassive still-
ness of a wadi, suddenly reached in the desert, with its shining parched
boulders. Along that seaboard I underwent my first Bophis/andoctrination.
You have seen the male chest, she would suddenly say, sweeping out of the
sea like its first creature, Mould you please tell me what those nipples
are doing? Can you suggest a use for them? They could equally be on
his backside for all the function they havel Isn't it clear (throwing
herself dripping on to the sand, which immediately covers her belly with
a dark slimy fur) that these useless buttons are memorialsfrom the time
he was a woman? Doesn't it seem possible to you that he is a degeneration
of the female? Of course I don't mean that Adam came out of Eve's side
or anything like that, I'm not trying to be paradoxical. But surely the
woman is the basic biological model: nothing in her make-up fails to
have a life-giving function! And dare we compare the male's quick fert-
ilising spasm to the subtle metamorphosis that engulfs the woman's entire
body, life, thoughts for the nine months of conception?
It was the strangest dialectics I had ever heard, and I just smiled.
It didn't discourage her. Hitherto I had thought of male and female as
simply complementary to each other. Yet I absorbed her arguments, even
while thinking them ridiculous. I began to see men in a different way.
My mind remained uninfluenced, but I found myself acting on her view of the
male and not/what had once been my own. It helped this process, I
A L
suppose, that at this time I bggan to find many friends among queanst
(so many-
twice-married independent women with private incomes
and a love of travel da!) Their frail and distraught nervous systems,
perpetually on the edge of total collapse, were a relief for me after
men who had seemed to have no nervous systems at all. Sophia had an


odd attitude towards them. She felt they were biological allies,
Somehow
And
Ker
in having/ceded the male phosition. L They shared the-same outraged
horror at the intimate procreative act. These men, she said-and when
she talked EP appalling French it always meant insincerity-were les
sensitifs, too gifted and rarified to accept the brute man--woman forn-
ication as a way of love! I felt like asking whether their substitute
was any more pretty or less brutish. But she saw this already. She
knew too that they were perhaps not her best friends. They tended to
mock her. They thought her too fearful a freak to do more than giggle
and gasp over. One or two, seeing beyond the freak all of a sudden,
realising that she was entirely without the lesbian furies they had attrib-
uted to her, became close to her like brothers. On the whole she kept
away from them. Strangely enough it was the deeply married men with
public positions who became her best friends. For them she sort of
anaesthetised her doctrine of gender. God knows how she did it. God
knows how! But there was always an unexpected variety in her reactions.
When I asked EEr half-aloud one day, How has the sex act got separated
from child-conceiving in the human being? she turned to me and said
quietly, People don't stop making love when they get beyond the child-
conceiving age, or when they become sterile, they stop when they can
no longer discover themselves through each other that way. The cessation
of sex either causes the collapse of marriage or its spiritual climax.
How could she have known this, or come to think it? I looked at her
for signs that she was quoting it all-even for a sign of burlesque-
but she was serious, her head bowed, a serene frown on her face.
As I say, this is about the last island I would have chosen to live
one Its rounded hills have a barren and parched look, shaved of trees
and undergrowth. Its towns are heaps of new masonry, apart from the
west
harbour on the est coast and the tiny fishing port that faces open


sea to the
Here and there you come on heavily perfumed, needle-
floored pidnwoods that make you feel you are mistaken. But lack of water
bars the luscioust you have to dig five hundred metres for it in some
parts.
aness The people are, to my mind, ambiguous like the two languages they
speak, squashing them almost into one by their slurred, passive way of
enunciating. There are no industries to speak of, yet the island has
almost no phistory either. The one superb building is the hospital.
Its vast leaning walls, bleached in the sea-air, leap out of the fishing
port like a sudden decision to give the island character after all. It
was once the island's fortress. Its windows are small, and some of them
remain barred from the time it was a prison (treason and murder).
Yet I lived here for a number of years long before the Aarons decided
to come, or Sophia decided for them. I built myself a house down by the
fishing pott. A salt-water canal passed under my kitchen window. I
suppose it was a way of celebrating my release from imperial honours and
obligations. I feel these on me still, like a gilded shadow, even in
the way I form my sentences, the result ophiacaulay and after-dinner speeches.
I wanted to live among sailors (this was before everyone became an intellect-
sailon,
ual), and for two or more years I saw pyiad Rase except for bewildered
relatives who thought that by descending on me suddenly they could sort of
shock me out of my madness. Of course they made me yearn for my sailors
even more. I developed a technique of claiming that my guest rooms were
under quarantine and I was therefore obliged to find them hotel rooms five
miles away. There they sweltered, and I could be sure that at least my
twilights and dawns were my owne I had a habit of strolling out on to
my balcony overlooking the fishing vessels-ance at dusk and immediately
on first light. It was a kind of homage. People tell me now that I was
greatly loved and respected down there. I helped people whenever I could,
I financed one or two educations. They climb the hill to visit me some-


times, to tell me about a first communion or birth. I am still La
Biondina for them (better than Cassandra, whose prophecies were never
believedt).
In recent years new villas have sprung up all round, in the area
along the southern coast between the fishing port and the harbour.
Their expensively landscaped gardens improve the look. Even the public
footpaths are now lined with oleander, and you see young cypresses push-
ing up everywhere. It was apparently the vast hospital, seen from the
approaching ferry like a dazzling mammoth tooth emerging from the sea,
that attzacted Aaron when thef thpreebf them paid their first visit.
They stayed at the sweltering hotel. I saw them one evening, at dinner
under the vine-pergola with its faery lights. They were deep in talk,
a whole
seeming to carry/the world about with them. Theyp sucked the white-
jacketed waiters into their orbit, and the dishes that were brought to
their table seemed in the strangest way pre-ordained for them. I was
fascinated. A few days later I heard they were looking for a plot of
land. Miranda, just married (to one of my sailors) and of course anxious
to get a job with foreigners if one was going, asked me did I know of a
place near the hospital. I found a ten-acre peice of wellvirrigated
land going freehold, next door to the banking gentleman. He always
looks faintly bewildered as he takes his walks now, with his silver-knobbed
cane: years ago I remember him standing at the harbour almost every
morning during the summer months, watching the unloading. He stood there
so firm-looking, not a muscle astir, as if a personal problem had never
mand.
crossed his lasee Perhaps these money-people don't have such things.
They simply play the market and spend the proveeds. Perhaps St Jerome
was right, homo mercatbor vix aut nunquam potest Deo placere.
Yesterday he suddenly appeared at our front door, the cane in his
hand to which Sophia has applied many shafts of her Mediterranean wit in
But,
the last few years! LMaving snubbed him at Mrs Aaron's request, she


feels a special protective sympathy for him, though they never once met
again-until, as I say, yesterday. After almost falling on her back with
surprise she gave him one of her enormous hugs that made him look like a
bear-cub. Then she swept him into the lounge where I was just excavating
some rocks for my first evening whisky. The breeze from the olive trees
was cool and scented, freshened by Athe recent storms. He sat down with
a benign and mellow look at me, andmade a pleased chuckle when Sophia
handed him the fizzy, lemon-topped gin-drink he had asked for, He let
her do a the talking. Without the slightest hesitation-lorious
Sorpia, so impenitant,risking everything-future, reputationl-she
launched into an explanantion of what had happened five, or was it seven,
years ago. He simply gazed and smiled. The only reaction he permitted
himself, after she had blackened the name of Aaron, was an easy movement
of the hand, the palm open and uplifted, half deprecating what she said
and half implying that it was all forgotten and forgiven. That evening
apain
she sang. And in her bath the following morning, today, it was Desdemonaf
always a good sign. She loves to mend a relationshaip. Rifts haunt her,
because really the whole Race is her family. Whenever a visitor from the
to inanca,
States mentionaa Il Tacco,I always noticed the immectats rim of melancholy
that beojgnsto shade her eyes.
Yet Sophia is admirably insensitive. I mean she could never weather
her inner storms without it. She must trample on someone when necessary.
Yes, she has always been insensitive to the fragrant secret whispers in
another's heart, particularly a man's. She has a favourite little speech
which she reserves for the queans: You know, I have this hearty male
exterior, but there is a woman's heart beating inside mel (Only the
queans could possibly think the exterior 'male'l). This brings me to
another aspect of hers the cunning. Someone said once, When Sophia
comes in the room twenty foxes enter with her. The foxesare always
sniffing, darting about surreptitiously, silently. On some rare


occasions, perheps during her long morning struggle to wake up, or very
late at night, the foxes creep back to their holes and rest. They are
protecting her. She has to have them. The whole earth is on her side-
including
yes, 1/the animals most of us fail to seel In her arms a dog will some
times all but faint with awed excitement! Without this foxy protection
from the earth she would long ago have succumbed to human attacks. This
is why the cunning has never bothered me. It fights for her triumph.
She must triumph at all costs, the poor darling! It is why she is almost
never in real repose. Sleep crushes her with a vengeful hand, like death,
every day. It has to, to save her body. She would never be still other-
wise. She suddenly dashes off to the mainland---and you may get a cable
an hour or a week later saying she is staying overnight on the mainland,
or/in Yugolsavia, or EU Maine. Not one labourer's house on this island
will not spread table for a banquet when she puts her head in the door,
singing, *Sophia' is a name that brings light to their eyes, like a
marvellous legend they heard in childhood. She is invited to more
baptisms and first communions than anyone I've ever known. On the whole,
the island-folk keep her away from their marriages: they show a deep
instinct here, a certain irony perhaps too. They adore her presence at
all finished, never embryonic, occasionst
Really Sophia cant understand. She only has flashes of understanding.
Otherwise you can't explain the simplest situation to her. Her eyes pucker
up in a painful way, and you see that she simply has to give up trying to
think it outs And those flashes of understanding seem, not the result of
sentitivity to the currents of other people's lives, but direct apprehension,
sent to her from another (and supernatural) field, which accounts for the
stunned look on her face, as if she were being used for a divine trans-
mission, for a reason she will never knowl
a KWS


Cassandra goes on to talk below about how Josh, one of the
Renegade's sons, happened to stay with her and Sophia some years before.
The Renegade never knew about this visit. It is worthwhile explaining-
as Cassandra fails to-that Josh had heard about Sophia from the Mother
Superior of the convent EE at that time she was matron of the mainland
hospital and very much involved with the drug cases that came in).
Josh was, as we shall see, hooked on just about everything short of
heroine The Sophian legend awoke something in him. And when he was
fit enough to seem human even to himself, after a year on LSD, or perhaps
barbiturates, he visited Sophia, and stayed for a couple of weeks.
What he learned from her-whether it changed his life-we do not know.
But she was about the only creature over thirty he didn't quarrel with
or hypostasise as Adult and therefore Status Quo Incarnate. The int-
eresting hhing for us is how the Mother Superior came to hear of Sophia.
Cassandra says, in fact, that it was the Mother Superior who first heard
about Sophia from Josh, who had listened to his own father's gasped
descriptions of 'that outlandish creature', Where the link lies I
cannot say, but I suggest it was through Miranda, whose sister worked
in the convent refectory. This is convincing, except that at the time
the Mother Superior was matron of the mainland hospital. However,
her connections with the enclosed sisters at the island convent were
always close.
Sophia has no explanation for the Renegade's visit. He sipped two
drinks slowly, gazing at us with that serene authority big money bestows


even on the unfittest. We both know how unfit he is to exercise auth-
ority of any kind through his son Josh, as he calls himself. The *Rene-
gade f has no idea of this prior knowledge Warkmb we have of him! He knows
nothing of his youngest son's visits to us. He too pppeared at the door
unexpectedly, about three years ago. And he was a total stranger. Yet
he stayed with us for two or more eeeks, hidden away. The moment I saw
his long pale face, and incredibly black hair, I recognised the father:
but here was something almost gorilla-a small, flattened nose, wide and
prominent cheek-bones, a long jaw, and above all# #ae eyes which never spoke!
- How can I put it? You wanted to turn away from such a bottomless
gazel Sophia did her usual arm-flinging and kissing, and pushed a drink
into his hande He looked at it with a perplexed half-frown. I could see
he would have preferred a joint, as they calf it. He did everything with
an uncalculated slowness. You thought he was never going to reach his
destination. Even his blinking was slow. His answers came seconds after
they should have, his gaze travelled towards you with that terrible gravity
of a black moth that has mastered slow motion. Slowness often seems
oracular. Not this. Yet he spoke intelligently. He never stopped
talking, slowly, his eyes fixed on a point which might or might not be your
eyes. His arms hung loose. It was all kindness, what he spoke. How
good they had been to him at the local hospital. How he couldn't stand
to see his father again, not that he had anything against his father,
but he was reminded of himself, and that was precisely what he was fighting.
And how glad he was that he had been on all these 'trips' during the last
two years--ending in the collapse of his system. He had been through
them all, he said, except the one you never leave agaip, heroin. This
way he had broken through his father's lies, he said. At once Sophia,
alert to the chance of defaming one more male, Asked what these lies weres
Just his whole psychology, the son said, all his shit about there being a


society, and us having duties towards it, and how we had to control our-
selves because we are all egotists and if we let ourselves go life would
be one big messa He ought to know about the egotism, the son added with a
peculiar croaking laugh that was too slow to sound like good cheer, since
he's about the most selfish bastard I've ever known! And I like him for itl
It's cosy, being that selfish! And what about your mother? Sophia asked
(a chance here of putting a foot in the door of the Renegade Villa, and
rescuing the matron!). Oh her, the son said with a shrug that seemed to
take longer than the encreoching darkness, she's such a liar you feel sorry
for her, she never knew what the truth was, I mean she just can't tell the
difference between a true thing and a false thing---she's just nervous,
and her whole idea is to assert whatever is convenient or what disguises
something she did and feels pad about or what saves time and trouble.
She'd pitch tent on a pile of corpses and talk about the nice sea-air,
and you can't get away from it that there's a certain courage in that,
it takes a lot of energy to construct a totally false world from one end
of the day to the other. Oh (a look deep down into his crutch, as if
he had found-without alarm--something crawling there), I love 'em both.
It's the great thing in my life. You see, they helped me find the real
world. I enjoyed the hallucinations best, they took me right out and
thosetiro ae
beyand, I mean the LSD. I saw how thayire making it up all the time
now I can enjoy the grotesquenss-all their buddies, who are half dead,
and think they're big dealf -the top doctors who couldn't heal a sore toe,
the top lawyers and top bankers and top politicians-you see, I took a long
journey, right to the edge of madness, and I came back and after that I
realised they didn't have a thing, they're just a lot of poor damned for-
Reels,
too, d
saken dle
cneren and hopeless/ ritadess; when you're that low
you need wealth! He turned the black moth of his gaxe on to Sophia with
immense slowness--I wanted to rush over and protect her-and said, You're


lucky, you've never fitted any of the patterns, I mean you never had to
fight your way out, isn't that so? She nodded with a girlish modesty
I had never seen before (this was one of the ways she barred all talk about
herself that might go too deep, apart from the fact that she had probably
understood little or nothing of what Josh had said). During his stay
E slept endlessly, ate ravenously and never laid his hands to a thing.
His only exercise in all that time was lifting a knife or fork or glass to
feed himself. Then he BxRk drifted out of the house and we never heard of
him again. He said his father often talked about Sophia, and something
had made Josh feel she was 'very special', so he had come to her straight
from the hospital across the way, instead of going home. I believe he
returned to the hospital for a time. Of course we never said a word to
the father. He seemed so innocent of all this. Thinking about it afterwards,
Sophin's
I saw the son as simply belonging toj e end of the world. I thought that
since the future always lays an engaging hand on the young for its jobs to
be done, a young army was now available for the last destruction of all! Yes,
Here was an end-of-the-world child. His eyes, bereft of even the primordial
hope of survival, finding therefore love out of the question, having nothing
to look forward to, and horror to look back on, declared Sophia and me simple,
credulous, hopelessly enraptured children of creation! Yes! After he left
the house I suddenly gave up the crabbing conviction that I was an old
woman! What nonsensel I was simply what I saw before me, what I felt,
what I loved in Sophia, I was the tremulous excitement of waiting for her
in the evening-how absurd to think of years as the determining factor of
a state of being!
It is now two nights that he lies safely in hospital. Where is my
purring goddess? where the rich round curves under the loose gown? the
hair coiled in black and grey snakes? the handsthat have grown to the
shape of the voluptuous parts they have formed? Remember the compact
you made with all of us, just by your presence- never to diel


One cannot but agree with Sophia when she says that women force
her back into her 'amphibian destiny' all the timel Here is Cassandra,
a balanced, reflective woman, seeing out the last of her days in an
imperial haze of seaboard dreams and Augustan books and whisky, who
reserves a surviving part of herself for Sophia's agony, as we shall
especially) see,later, when she hopes for Sophia to return to the house
'frantic'. Benign and deeply protective of Sophia as few other friends
are, Cassandra just the same waits like the carrion crow for a quarrel to
prostrate herl And Aaron's wife? Is that really her speaking? Is
is really possible that she will try to keep her husband in hospital in
order to enjoy Sophia alone? But she and Sophia never see each otherl
They will certainly not meet if they can help itl So we have the engaging
scene of a woman calculating harm to her husband simply to enjoy in solit-
ude certain thoughts towards a woman three kilometres away! So not
simply women but women's thoughts beam their night-and-day rays on to
Sophia, leaving her no time for that 'life of my own' she has always
talked about and dreamed about, and never had, because her life is not
her own and that is thats Quite a predicament! Now do we wonder why
she pours herself out so passionately on the subject of gender?
what
But/we could never have predicted is that aman should turn the same
visir
order of thought-ray on to her, and even
her to feast his eyes
on herl And what man? The Renegadel It seems impossible, even to
himself-aspecially to himselfi But an interesting thing has happened
in his mind. He has come to feel close to her though her having once
spurned hime There are certain men who always come back for moree
Her rudeness -my planted in him an intrigued curiosity towards her
person. Hatred is a close relationship, after all. It is dangerous
to enter its shallows if you don't want to drown in its depthsl But


he waded in. And Sophia grew in his mind. As he comes to like Aaron
less and less, so he feels himself drawn nearer Aaron's fabricated enemy,
Sophia. So his thoughts too grow feverish out of the fever of other
people's thoughts! He finds himself walking towards the Sophia villa.
As quickly, he will forget his infatuation. His life is so ordered,
so carefully sober and measured, without being in any way really balanced,
as to leave the animal energies dangerously under pressure. Yes, as
the Mother Superior would says the rationalist comes up against demons
where he least expects them-insidel His wife manages to contain them,
to some extent, in bed (as he manages to contain hers). But the bed
cannot account for everything. Here he is blind even to what he wants
from Sophia. Perhaps it is an infatuation with the beast! He only
knows, like Bottom (as his son Josh would say), that he has something on
his headmit could be dream and it could be fact-but it alters all
life for a time. Afterwards, when he has 'recovered', he finds it hard
to recognise the infatuated man who went before-to believe that the
ass's head was there. But he never recognises himself because he looks
for himself in the mind (again the Mother Superior):


I did an unbelievable thing. I walked straight up the hill and
lady
knocked on Sophia's door! There was a rather nice elderly NEN with her, she
had
never
T oneof those old-world accents I can"s/understand. What is happening
to me? Thine eyes shall behold strange women, and thine heart shall utter
perverse things! She has begun to remind me in a strange way of that
shameless creature in the Manhattan hotel-wes, Sophia, suddenly I feel
I could derive from you as drastic a change as I did from those rough
handsl It could be the heat, the intoxication of these sea breezes,
but I give way to it, I feel no responsfbility, I am the dog who leaves
home to follow a scent-it is all nonsense of course but I persist! I
even want to laugh! What has happened to the world I knew as a child
when we murdered in orderly fashion? I could scream with laughter to
hear myself talking like thisl Imagine, me know an hermaphroditel
All this talk and high philosophy and stuff makes me scream with laughter!
As I say to my wife when she climbs up on her high metaphysics platform,
Just close the door and we'll settle your little ontological hash, we'll
see if I can't mount you on to something more substantial than Leibnitzl
Windows of the soul my arsel What a marvel it is to weke up to the fact
that business life is simply a veil, and to proceed to DANCE BEHIND IT
LIKE A MANIAC. Yes, Josh, you shall see wildness in your father yet!
Do you realise I could tear everything down that you think so settled and
established un my life?
Indeed, you taught me nothing else but your powers of destruction.
I asked my Judas-wife (I can see she is yearning for the strange
one againl) not to allow him near the hospitafl,and the first thing she
tells me is, The Renegade's coming up this afternoon. It is almost as
if S. were with us again! Oh, S., your powers! Anyway, he came.
Leaned his silver-tipped rod of importance on my bed of all places
(God, how I know these Jews!) and sat down purring like a small black


cat, his mellow eyes that seem to be rimmed with god settled on me like
a couple of ducats. I wish he wouldn't sit down so emphatically, I mean
lower himself with such plumb ease that you think first the chair will
give, then the floor, then the entire island, succumbing under the shefe
gravitational pressure of so much worldliness! Oof, it makes me believe
that perhaps those Alexandrian Jews were right and the devil may yet win
his battle with the Lord! How amf I? I simply nod, with a slight
raising of the eyebrows to denote that while doing rather badly I am really
rather well. Not a word from my lips. The wisdom of the prudent is to
understand his way but the folly of fools is deceit. For a fool layeth
open his folly.
I completely fooled hime I even put more questions than I meant
to. I was astonished how unguarded he was. He couldn't pfossibly know
what was passing through my mind. I seem to have become one of Plato's
madmen-at first a shudder went through me, at the thought of hearing
about HER, and an awe that seemed to come from before life-yes, I have
seen my Sophia in a life of dreams! She has a man's parts below and a
woman's above, and she speaks all kinds of delphic things! At the same
time I have a sinse of self-disgust, that I have wondered off into limbo
and will never again retrieve my grip on life. Yet my wife sees nothing! As
long as
I rise and retire at the same timest It's just no good if I take these long
holidays. On the other hand I waited twenty years to build this house and
it has to be inhabited. I shall only recognise myself again when the
Threadneedle Street Atraffic is dinning in my ears. I have a feathery
feeling between my legs that unforeseen events are being prepared. I
want to hear more about myself-this is how I feell And only this
delphic creature can tell mel Zwas so excited I almost trembled when
at last I'd got him to talk about her (he can't stop hbs tongue running
in the old groove). And I was deliriously happpy that any state of
feeling could cause such a clear reaction in me-I mean, poets and


such-like tremble this way, and here am I- Perhaps I am on the
threshold of bestialityl
Far from fooling me, he made me a roaring lion, ravening the prey!
He determined me not to yield an inch of my lower garden, nor a drop of
water, for he thinks there is a water-source under my vegetable nursery.
He has been in water trouble since he built that house. And just because
he went about it in such a dark and devious way, hiding behind questions
about HER, I decided even to go back on my word of last year and not sell
him ayard ora gallon. For if I gave him all the waters of Sion what
would he do but invite even more guests to his house, and double his blasted
soirées, with music belching between the pine trees and the fumes from his
barbecues drifting up to our windows like a sacrifice of the heathent
Nol An east wind shall come, the wind of the Lord shall come up from the
wilderness, and his spring shall become dry, and his fountain shall be
dried upl
I realise I have begun to make war on hime He lies in bed with his
beard over the sheet, following me with his eyes, unless one of the sisters
is about (the brides of Christ always manage to show a curve before they
leave the room). I have become the serpent Apophis, the demon of the
Egyptian abyss, the ocean that swallows up the sun at twilight each dayl
I have become Ammut, eater of the dead, watch-dog of Osiris, formed of
lioness, crocodile and hippopotamus. I have become strangel I can no
longer say I am his wife. I can no longer even be convinced that I
belong on this earthl It is even useless talking to me about the racel
Like Siva I fly over the battlefield with its wounded and dead, my hair
behind me in the wind, my eyes wild and my laughter echoing! Yes, I
am free. And I simply cannot tell what I will do. And if anyone told me
it was me who got him into hospital I would say yese He was passing my
door, and I offered my neck like the tower of Davide And he parted my


locks to touch the pomegranate of my temple! And I knew that it was
one time too many, given his age and state. My gaze was terrible and
yielded t
clear as he gee/me in a last exhausted sacrifice the very marrow of his
bones. That afternoon he didn't get/from his siesta. And in the house
that evening, when he was already in the hospital, I felt a presence that
I can only describe as mellow like the evening sun as it dies behind the
swollen female cypresses, and the rooms seem to emit a glowing light of
their own manufacture. I sat down on the terrace and gazed across the
garden. I heard noises from the town. The sea was calme I saw its
lust
blinding flash as the/sun caught it. And I myself-what I called I
myself...disappeared. I was no longer tied to anything. I no longer had
a name. And if I hurried oreto hospital with as much fruit as a human being
could carry it was because of the habit of good we are all born toy Someone
once said, Our tendency to good is like the tendency of water to go downwards,
and our tendency to bad an attempt to throw the water up-but it will not
stay that way for long. The most contradictory thing of all is that,
planning war on him, I feel no tendency towards the bad. I feel it has
nothing to do with good or bad. It is something ordained, required. It
belongs to the primal, and I am simply its instrument.
Does he see the truth? But if he does I can blind him with pleasures!
trmugh
Yes! Isn't that the gauntlet that UL woman makes her man runf -new
sensations? Isn't that where we achieve our hold on our heros? My
beardochero-Zeusl Yes, Zeus-until the female hand goes its silent journey,
and then Zeus takes a holiday from his firmamental chores! Has Sophia
succeeded then? Am I indeed her pupil? Did her message only penetrate
me after she had gone, and after I had started hating her, with the delay
germinalions
of incubation that all new tntnpe/roquire? Why doesn't she speak?
I can tell you! Because she is too busy with the Map of Sanbial That
map shows jet-routes to every part of the world, between London and Sidney,
Tokyo and Los Angeles, Madrid and Stockholm! And she is either moving


across this Map to one of her numberless stations of call (where a wife
trembles with expectant yearning, a husband with fear) or else awaiting
the arrival from one of these stations of a panting guest. Either
moving towards or being moved towards by someone elsel The Map is
always in function. Never a moment day or night when the capyain of
some jet-aircraft is not unknowingly the servant of her desires. This
is why she does not speak to me. She is too busyl There are too many
of usl
And how we hate each other, we veterans of the Sophian army. We
all shine with an individual light for her. What colour did I shine?
I think perhaps a promising pink. But nowoif she saw me now-I would
shine for her as innocuously dim as an eclipse of the sun, and as danger-
ous to the eyel Yes, I have begun a new lifel
The strangest reference in the above is that to Siva. It simply
does not sound like Aaron's wife, and I assume that someone else inter-
polated a remark. Certainly she has become as terrible as Sival She
has achieved her detachment from her man, which seems to have been half
the reason for her infatuation with Sophia. For infatuations are not
simply the result of a glimpse of the Face of the divine, as Sophia
said much earlier. They take place to serve functionsbf which we are
as yet entirely unaware! We leap on to each other's backs at an in
ceedible rate-to get over this fence, that ditchl We are a at one
and the same time strong enough to carry others, and weak enough to need
a liftl We shudder at a chasm which for someone else is a soft decline,
we laugh at an easy gate that for someone else is a fearful portcullis


with poisoned spikest We do not see 'the world' in the same way.
The 'world* as a permanent, shared background we all agree about is a
necessary fiction. We carry on our shoudlers aeons of past efforts,
which determine our present ones, in a lifelong (Sophia would say
'lives-long') struggle to eliminate the shades of the past, and reach
the open spaces where our will at once translates itself into destiny.
The novel, in its brief history, tried to make a 'world that remainde
the same even through several generations, not to say through crowds of
different coevl characters. The characters tende to fulfil fixed
roles towards the fixed roles of those they loved or hatef, and towards
the fixed world of objects around them. That the novel was for a long
time closely associated with the newspaper, in serfialisation, could have
been expected, since the newspaper was always the vehicle par excellence
of the fiction of a shared and absolute 'outside world which simply had
to be observed, without the relativity of the observer ever being mentioned.
It accounted for that vaguely hypocritical tone of 'authority' and "im-
partiality' that crept into the two media, as a style to hide the doubts
and the too-quick changes that confounded observation every time. The
author of the novel which ran thorugh several generations was not a man
who himself had several lives. Nor was he several characters in one.
He was as acutely relative as all of us, but without ever laying his cards
on the table. Of course, the novel was a symbol, a token for a view of
the workings of destinys with the world fictionalised into a static (nice
for dreaming) world 'outside'. Well, the novel was fiction, after all.
That we long ago began to live in a fiction, with the newspapers renew
ing/ daydream each morning, is not so healthy. Now the novel was a product
of rationalism, which is why it came labout in the eighteenth century or
epoch of 'enlightenment'. And it began to fade in our time ad writer
after writer found the world* he was supposed to talk about disintegrat-


ing in his fingers.
Mr Renegade (how respectfully I place Mr in front of his nicknamel)
needed his infatuation with Sophia too, for darker purposes than Aaron's
wife. He needs, not liberation from wife or friend, but more acquaintance
with the animal. This, for him, has its healthy side. He wants to DANCE
BEHIND A VEIL LIKE A MANIAC, he says somewhere. Exactly. He is mending
his rationalism, compensating for its harmful paralysing action on his own
development. Yes, each to his role, which means, not simply a relation to
others (that is, to their roles) but to himself, to his yet undiscovered
self.
I carried home all he told me about her like a man with a box full of
rubies. I went straight to thelavatory off the courtyard, which is about
the only place I can be alone, and thought about it. I sat there for
such a long time that when I returned to the verandah my wife asked me
if I had a stomach upset. I said no, I got engrossed in a murder storyo
To which she said that, seeing the number of murder stories that were
piling up in the cellar, she wondered I didene get bad dreams. I said
I got bad dreams anyway-with a little click of my tongue. I like saying
quick, drys effective things like that, just before I sit down with a
decisive wallop and open the newspaper with an ear-splitting crack that
is meant to be the signal for the close of all conversation. It didn't
close this conversation (it never does, to be honest) but I heard nothing
more she saide Now I know what 'secret' means, in the Book. I carry
it with me, my tabernacle of silencel
It's happened again! I always hope that the last time will have
been really the last. But nol Someone new is always sent, a revelation
from the heavenly chambersl-to stir my amphibian destiny again.


But of course-how could those chambers, being immense to the point of
dwindling immensity itself to the field of numbers, fail to yield contin


ually their angels, their beasts and goddesses? We are watched all the
timel And I lie here quivering, hoping to preserve myself against this
dazzling multitude of wonders He releases on mel I always hope not to be
torn again, not to plunge Cm-ma into that abyss of scorching light
where I am once more thet black child standing on the beach--making them
look at me with such surprise that the wet sand trickles out of their hands
and they forget to make their E castles! She came yesterday! Un-
leashed from the heavenly chambers! Arrived at the door, unheralded by
had
a cablegraml We had met in New York. But she/looked so different there!
It was an Madison Avenue, I called in to have my hair done as usual and
the proprietor, a delightful quean I always go to the theatre with, whisp-
in ear
ered huanye that he had someone new and 'special', before ushering me over
to her chair. Iwon't say she did my hair. She ecreated it. She
mystical
sent dE te currents through it. It danced like snakes under her
at firet, ttan
fingers! And all the time she spoke to me, softlyk emetimes shouting,
while
when I was under the drier. And I said, Come to my place in the sun if
you happen to be holidaying that way, and I gave her my address as I do
a dozen times a day (that is, a dozen times a day I invite my bowels to
be torn opent). And yesterday she walks up the hill from parking herf
red
suicidaltwo-senter on the tarmac road below. There she was as I opened
the door, bold teeth radiant in the darkness of her face, her rebellious
hair in defiant BEEE almost threatenfing life on her head, tumbling down
her cheeks, fiding her brow-and her eyesl--those deep savage caskets
brimming with sensual machinatton, what will you do to me? And her first
carfonters workrhep
words So light and pure, Did I remember saying I knew of a
fmmiey where she might perhaps learn a little moweEtng-m carving and
suchlike for her spare time, after the hot damp day in the Madison Avenue
salon for expensive ladies? Yes,ges, I rememberl-which I don'tl-
but I mean by 'remembert from a former time, from my childhood, yes I


remember you, how you stood there with the wet sand drubbling out of
your handsl U 1 how I long to travel back and tread again that ancient track!
So you came to me-you returned-I had forgotten the actual look of those
two great black holes of fire you call your eyes-I anly remember how they
burned me on that beach, before you turned away, and now you are back in
another body! And I know there is nothing consecutive in life, that the
time we take as the span of the day is only the time of conuenience, usefyl
for making money and plans. The real time lies inside, and I know that
nothing has happened between that day on the beach and the moment yesterday
when you Happeared and we looked at the sea in the distance like the grey
sparkling scales of a fish cupped between two hilly hands! I led you
upstairs to my room where you glanced with that savage flash of the eyes
and a quicky flourish of those dangerous snake-strands on your head at
the huge mirror standing opposite my bed. Terrible, machinating glance!
What future contortions did they see? And at the foot of the bed we
took tea. And I realised that no one knew we were there, apart perhaps
from Cassandra downstairs, quietly drinking herself to death, disgorging
from her memory files of sailor boys with matted hair who all but drowned
in her climaxes. And even, my poteen prophetess knew nothing about your
arrival, however much 1 she might hear your tread on the floor now.
The tea refreshed you! You sat quietly, your eyes flashing their
challenges in the dimness of the room, shuttered against the afternoon
sune Thpy lips, 0 my spouse, drop as the honeycomb: honey and milk
are under thy tongue, and the smell of thy garments is like the smell
tinged witk Rair- ypmy!
of Lebanony And so savage, so rasping' your sentences, your voice
droning-shaft after shaft of dry irony at the world! Thouf hast
ravished my heart, my sister, my spousel thou hast ravished my heart
with one of thine eyes, with one chain of thay neckl


Where on Sophia's Map is she? She said the sea was the grey of a
fish's scales--that cannot mean the sea round this islandi Is it per-
haps the Atlantic? She talked once about building on the Atplantic sea-
board. And there was a project of her moving to the Pacific coast.
But then I remember her saying-I think I heard her say it just now
but her voice was far away, as in sleep-that she had closed the shutters
against the afternoon sune The Balearic isles, the Canaries, Mauritius,
Malta, Cyprus, Lemnos, Skyros, Haionnesos, Paparethos, Polyaigos, Zakynthos,
Kaphallenia, Leukas, Kythara, Melos? Wherever you are, in whatever sea,
tropical or clement or cold, may the stones of your house fragmentate to
powder and your foundations subside into chasms, may you be set to flight
and return to where I enjoy remembering you, on East 42nd Street, you jet-
driven earth-cowl
The island-names above receded into the ancient world- 'Paparethos'
was
etc. I cannot believe that this B all spoken by Aaron's wife. But
here I must face another possibility- --that people do not speak with their
own mindst Other voices enter them, other knowledges. It isn't that
the mind dips into a kind of pool of the 'unconscious' where all the past
events of one's life are stored up. We shall see later the Mother
Superior's attack on Athe Freudian unconscious-another fictional
area with its suggestions of the static and permanent. No, the will
calls up past events-even past events from other people's lives
even unfamiliar knowledge-when it needs them, and this is a manufactur-
ing process, not a matter of dipping into a still pool. We have access,
says
a the Mother Superior, to all knowledge, according to our needs,
which means also our capacities. Can a knowledge of Chinese suddenly


appear, if the need is deep enough? Not suddenly. Yes, suddenly if the
need has pursued its course, taking no account of the space-time formula.
But the knowledge of what the Chinese language is-this may appear, in
quite another form from the language itselfi For the "Chinese language'
is only a form, to express something, among a million possible forms.
It is what knowledge tries to achieve that decides its forma And so,
according to what we try to achieve we call into being a correspanding
form, and may be surprised by the suddeny and unexpected 'knowledge' that
is presented to us apparently out of the blue. Here we come to the
those whose
eastern claim that all knowledge whatsoever appears Ato = I Er concent-
ration is great enough. That is, not 'facts' in the exploded (Einstein-
exploded) sense, but total knowledge, as a completely satisfactory form,
discovered not through the mind, where only the 'facts' are discovered,
but through the real self which does not change, nor : differ from one
person to another, though it may be hidden, and usually is hidden. As
I says this is the eastern claim--what I have picked up from the narratives
of the Mother Superior, who has been a kind of Socrates to Sister Mahat-
ma's Plato.
We ought to notice, In Sophia's narrative above, the frequency of
images that, meant to describe the Madison Avenue hairdresser, hark back
to Mabel Hale (*bold teeth in the darkness of her face', 'black holes Er
of fire you call your eyes'), Alio.m, t
in her mention of herself as the
yha may te afennig
"black child/ to those First 'experiences'of hers on the Valencian sea-
board, now perhaps ularlaced sith Ie Hale sfrinu.
Apparently Aaron's wife thinks that the Mediterranean never looks
'grey like a fish's scales'. She cannot have looked very hard. I
suggest that her idea of the Mediterranean is of a blue seag and that
this derives from reading more than observation. Here a thought is


stronger than sense-impression. It changes the colour of the seal
I have heard a wit say that the 'sunny south' still exists because the
northern tourists now bring it with them. It survives the cold and the
wet, the polluted beaches, the smog-veiled sunshinel
Sometimes I look up from my bed into her eyes-they are kindled with
hatred! Every wise woman buildeth her house, but the fool plucketh it
down with her handsl Her eyes are hot like cinders! They burn their
way across the night from her bedroom (always so vibrant with desirest)
to this hospital. I try to remember when we were last sitting together
peacefully, evaluating a papal bull I has just picked up, thirteenth
century, Gregory 1X, tied with the original silk, a bulla favorabilis
giving permission for a new church in Rome. They can go for as little
as thirty dollars, and I decided to hang on to it for better markets to
come. The canapis bulls, tied with string and not silk, were always
bad news for their receivers, and these go for more, our world being
committed, as it were, to bad news. I had just sold a crystal
chandalier for ten grand at Parke Bernet and was in no hurry for bread-
I had written the deal off (having dropped the thing on the kitchen floor
and repaired it) and then up pops a Texang what special powers did the
Lord give the state of Texas, to produce onebf its native-born at
almost any art-auction with thousands of bucks ready in his pocket?
Deft counter-bidding pushed him up to about twice what the thing
is worth.


A transference to the 'art dealer' here, whoever he may bewhe
is certainly not Aaron, though it is Aaron speaking-may argue an inter-
polation from outside, or a temporary wish on Aaron's part to be the art
dealer Sophia wanted him to be. He is deliberately 'playing' here, may
be. But it isn't his style pf language. Hompf, that could simply be
earnest play. It is possible that Jack Hale was an art historian and
advised dealers, even dabbled in the market, but it isn't his style of
language either. Aaron might be thinking of Hale at this moment, and
'giving' him words. Later in the book Aaron's wife wonders whether
Sophia could not help her market her work when she takes up soulpture
'as a mathematician', I mean there seems to be art-dealing somewhere
in their common background. Sophia may have dabbled in it, through
Jack Hale. The Florentine pieté may have come to her through hime
Perhaps Sophia taunted Aaron with being a book-worm, and he is rehearsing
here what may indeed become his profession later in life. He did cer
tainly appear at Parke Bernets for the book auctions, as we know already.
He knew about bidding and inside' counter-bidding. All professions aref
germinated
E rehearsing and
improvising
future
a mas
role. And the role either merges into the profession, once / starts
practising it, or it modifies the profession, he 'writes his own part'
and performs it.


amess
- a a
That night we lay in the olive grove below the house. The tray of
tea-things was still there at the Coot of my bed, just as we had left it
in the late afternoon, reflected in the vast mirror. We ate nothing,
drank not a drop of wine, just tiptoed past Cassandra's french windows
where she sat in her usual chair, composed and still in the last stages
of her day's drinking marathon, her brain now laid quiet, with no more
desires (that is, raging memories), gazing before her in the darkness,
over the heads of the dusty olive trees towards the sea. She always
at this moment,
looks lovely Aan/ her plump shoulders soft, her hair loose, as I remember
her twenty years ago, when the fisher-boys were tossing on the ocean of her
bed and emerging like soldiers from a new kind of beautiful war, where the
were
wounds a sweet. Ah, she had a power thenl And each night that power
steals on her again, when the brain goes quiet, and all she can say if
you knock off her door is, Please don't come in, whoever you are.
My Madison Avenue hairdresser wanted Ato know in a whisper who that
lady surrounded by a great light in the darkness was, but I stopped her lips
and we tiptoed over the hard clods, down to where it was smooth and you
could see the sea arguing with itself/secret?n! I had bought a thick
blanket. And later that night, when Cassandra had slumped her way to
bed, having knocked over a chair as she does every night (I always wait
for the sound before I go to sleep), I lay gazing up at the sky and was
vouchsafed what I can only call a visit-such as I could never describe
corgfer
to the
lying next to me, exhausted now from her ravages, asleep
like a child who has found home at last, For the black dome of the night
had opened before my eyes, its scattered silvery light from the stars
te poplars talow
greve
drawing aside with a breath that came through |the olive Jand clattered


their leaves like tin-foil, and everything that had happened to me in
the previous two hours was resolved-the stretching and scorching of my
insides in that perilous ecstasy that is pain too, and disaster, and my
destructionl-she had galloped from one explosion tothe next like a mare
full of oats, until thank God she slumped asleep-it felt as if my entrails
were joining the earth, actually about a - to feed the olive trees like the
dead pigs they used to plant under them-and now it was all resolved, and
my giddy regret that once again I was whirling and roasting in the martyr's
fire, clinging to that belt round my middle like a maniac-my regret too
was absorbed into that vast opening dome of the night, and the heavenly
breath touched my face, even kissed it with a message so deep that I shall
never see it in words or even feelings, and my horror at becoming the
serpent again was consumed into what I can only describe as a state of
divine prestige, as if my body were suddenly elected, unchallengeably
enthroned in that open-cracked dome beyond, where therw was no body but yet
me, released even from the burning I at that moment felt, having spilled
so much of the marrow of my bones. And I slept at once.
It seemed to me that suddenly I knew who I was. At dawn I looked at
her and realised that she had simply been sent to me, an instrument. A
certain loveliness from the evening before played on her lips. It was
like music hovering over theme This music was strange. I heard the
clink of cymbals, a dance of Katakali! The snakes of her hair were quiet
now, they had entangled themselves to death, and only another journey would
bring them to rebirth. And so I got up slowly, and left her, and went
upstairs to my bede I slept until Cassandra bellowed up from below,
What the devil's that lying under an olive tree wrapped in one of my
blankets?
And later that days after I had introduced them to each other and
everything was on a safe basis (of no further interest to me), some words


came to me, it seemed from many lives ago: I question not my corporeal
or vegetative eye any more than I would question a window concerning a
sight. I look through and not with it.
Are we speaking in English or what?
Cassandra and the Madison Avenua coiffeuse (smelling faintly of a
thousand and one rinses) talked quietly together. They had people in
common, apparently. Was this one still not dead, the other only half
so? Was this place substantial, the other still a dream? And as they
talked I realised that seeing the night broken open as I had I saw all
my future too, and the meaning of my body in its present, namely as a
vehicle for my future. When we look into our past we see our function
performed: and in the future lies the performer, which is not my body,
nor my life, but that of which my life is one of the enacting parts.
These words seem to come from far away, though they are my own. And they
are light, at the edge of meanipng. I slept for three hours in the after-
noon, until it was dark, and they had to come upstairs to find me, the coifée
euse helping Cassandra, an arm round her waist. I looked at them both as
if I had never seen them before, which indeed I hadn't,in many senses,
and at once I could see that this way of looking at them excited and
thrilled them. Their eyes, the one pair light and wondering, the
other flashing with dangerous serpentine designs-quickened as I looked
into them searchingly: the one hoping for a long evening of drink, the
other for-well, I would let them both have their desires. My body
sagged with resignation like a half-filled balloon. But for their
benefit I got out of bed with a great animal bound, shaing the house.
As I walked down the stone steps behind them, calling each of them darl-
ing, I felt such a suicidal reluctance to be there that it was far beyond
suicide: I was ferociously hungry for that sky again, that future, that
breath through the olive trees, that me which had no place here except for
the performance of lip-services, and at the same time I realised that


death is no liberation into one's promised future but only into one's
present deeds. Or rather I would say that understanding the key tp
one's.present deeds--discovering why destiny requires one to be tramping
down stone steps behind two women, one after the bottle and the other the
breast-is the liberation. Before we reached the lounge, where the
drinks sudeboard on one side argued for precedence over the overworked
divan on the other side, I had discovered my role, and begun to pefform
it with ayareness, because it had the gueranteeing stamp of the future on
it. I sat with them over dinner, sucking at the dangerously shaped white
asparagus tips, and waited until Cassandra had achieved the nightly demise
of her mind, then took the lady of the thousand and one rinses down to the
olive grove, and plunged once more into my painful ecstasies with a detach-
ment I had never known before-with such detachment that I felt I had
never properly lived before, only been pulled blindly into dances by the
wires of death. As it was, I could no longer see the possibility of
death. My role was now far beyond even myown lifel It stretched into
many lives. And so I could perform for these two women their wishes,
with a mysterious captiorting energy from beyond, knowing that I was
binding them to me-perhaps not only for this life eitherl I could
feel how every angle of my body was important for this-was bched LU
r tam
with thrilled eyes-as I talked/sitting at table, slumped forward on my
elbows, dressed in a simple Indian shirt down to my knees, naked ynder-
neaths I could actually see how my body had been kneaded to its shapes
in order to allure such eyes, and render its gifts back to the divine.
The hairdresser hardly dared touch me in the softness of the olive grove
that night. I discovered she was trembling. I had evidently taught
her that whetever she touched with her fingers was the inside and not
the outside of things. She trembled to see matter suddenly alive, having
always taken herself and it as essentially deade And the next morning


she was gone-before dawn! Perhaps, as she later ran her fingers through
the serpents of other heads, back in Madison Avenua, she felt the stirring
of something she dared not tell. Perhaps she too reserved its inferences
for the next life.
I ought to add that the two nights I spent in the olive grove were
about the only serene nights we have had all summer. I remembered some
thing said to me once, during the Harlem period, We have the ability to
create life. Usually there are violent thunderstorms that make me hop
and sing round the house with excitement, or rolling leaden clouds that
fill the place with anger. Vast sheets of rain billow to and fro for
days on end, leaving the summer air so cold that we put the central heat-
ing one There have been winds so fierce that our potted lemon trees
and our bougainvillea bushes, our great full-bellied vases brimming with
geranium dance in thee air and smash to pieces. Our exquisite Medit-
erranean balance has been mortally wounded! The sun is sick, glower-
ing through mists I have never known beforel My poor Madison Avenue
got frack lo
hairdresser was probably crippled with rheumatism when she p cied the
States, since we were lying on sodden ground. Sometimes there is a day
that blinds us with its old-world serenity, and we reject the other weather
as freak. But we are living dn borrowed time. I don't think this-it
just goes round with my veins. In this lies our liberation, for we are
liberated, isn't that so? From past and future, from present respon-
sibility! The past is a book, a museum! We have all read the FINIS
across the sky. It is to end the old creature and make a newl We are
on the way out of sexl Take no notice of the protestations of pleasure
or pain. They enjoy nothing, they love nothing! They are liberated
into nothing! I doubt if the new creature will take place on this
globe, or even in space and time. I think it hasn't been decided yet.
Just as the plant Awavers in its upward climb, deciding to avoid that


wall or this overshadowing branch-so our life has not yet determined
its new forma Thinking like this excites me because I, Sophia, have
helped to lead the Race out of its coils of procreation.
As I say, I never wanted to live here again but she insisted,
though of course not in words or persuasion, simply by moving events that
way. I think she loves to live near the flame of hatred. We are
within two kilometres of the Aaron villa. She hopes that one day even
this will be mended, and the family of the Race intact again.
Josh called me from the States, in the middle of the night of course.
He is supposed to have some sort of job, which I don't believe. In a
month from now the begging cable will arrive, OUT OF CASH DAD, and un-
signed. I imagine the job is the daily chore of commuting to New York
for the daily hash. These are serious times. His abandonment of
cocaine was a relief. He talked everybody's trousers off, and was always
jumb
one lab ahead in any discussion. Barbiturates made him dozy and easy-
going. I couldn't stand all that nonstop talk again, and the staring
eyes, and it makes their faces so ugly. He told me over the phone that
I loved people to the degree they loved me, and hated them to the degree
they hated me, and that was wrong, Imagine that around four in the
morning. Everything has to refer back to you, he said, for you to be
interested in it or understand it. He said if he slammed the phone down
then and there and said he hated me, I'd start to hate him and he'd never
hear from me again. I said, Are you ringing me at this hour to tell me
this? No, he says, I'm trying to find myself. plell couldn'y you find
yourself when I'm not asleep, I said. But I thought about what he said
afterwards. Isn't that the meaning of 'eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth'?
Don't we all do it, love to the degree we are loved?
He has mistaken the intention of the Scriptor. 'Eye for an eye,


tooth for a tooth' means that for every little bit of hatred you give,
you get the same degree of hatred back, and for every little bit of love
you give, you get the same degree of love back. This is bad news for
haters, good for loversl Life is in your handsi Rise and embrace your
freedom! This thought brought about a sudden revival in me-I took my
first walk in the hospital grounds, and I asked my Judas-wife not to come
today. I feel marvellously armed against her. It is good to be armed
with light and peace.
I returned this morning after a five-day gap and could not imagine
how it had been possible to see the island as I had seen it just five days
before. I sent the car ahead from the harbour and walked back, just to
get to know the island again in its new sanity. I almost asked myself,
But who is Sophia? I can no more tell you now why a few days ago I was
in a fever about a hermaphrodits than I could account for her behaviour.
I am only glad that I did go to see her, and get rid of that nasty feel-
ing I had had that she was a mocker of Jews. Her kiss was a great relief,
and I was almost inclined to believe her story that Aaron's wife had put
her up to it-to that bleak frown at the door. I mean she is so spontan-
Rer
eous and all-giving, it really is difficult to imagine/preparing a snub,
she really does seem too innocent a creature. Anyway, that's all shit as
far as I'm concerned now. I've had the din of the Threadneedle Street
traffic in my ears again. I spoke to New York for over an hour and a half
from my office, and the logical, the clean connections were established
again, and my lunches at the same ap the same table, with the same
ploces
Fred serving, not only reassured me, they gave a deadly once-and-for-all
slap to these island-Fevers: they said, 'Never again!'. I particularly
enjoyed grasping the morning paper on my return to the house, where my
wife was waiting with coffee and sandwiches as always, and the latest news
of the drug-world as purveyed by her three sonse Shit to that tool


I grasped the newspaper at the edges (after reading the outside columns)
so as to make it unreadable for others. I call this my little bit of
kaiserism. I think I can account a little for that fevers some kind
of virus has been going round the island, and I was feeling none too well
before I stepped on that plane. It probably was a fever, a real onel
Anyway, everything is in its place again. She no longer betwitches me.
You are bewitched not by me but by the mortal coils that revolve you
in endless cycles of pleasure and pain. You are so sure that what you
touch is real, and what you see is reall But they are thoughts, my dearl
You can never get away from thoughts! You created the fever, you created
the so-called reality on your return! But when you break through the
thoughts (you will never do it)-through the 'solid' things and 'seen'
things and *felt' things-you find a stillness that they call the real
birthl I say 'they' because I, Sophia, know as little as you do about
it: I am bewitched like you, I am revolved in the terrible and absurd
cycles which are only the consequence of being enelaved in thoughts.
My thoughts at this moment are in a Madison Avenua hairdresser's salon!
But I know I am bewitched. I am aware of that marvellous bewitching
power that lies behind everything, that can hold before us such dazzling
tapestries, and make us giddy with ecstasy at the touch- the right hand,
the right bosom! You are MERHE bewitched in the slave's way, I in the
handmaid's wayl I enjoy good fortune, you only wealth, which is the
bread of the forsaken. Even you must have asked yourself how it is
possible for Sophia to trade in her new car every year for an even newer
one
especially as she has a smash-up at least once a month-
and the asnwer is that all my satisfactions must be here and nows
I am in close accord with She who devises it all, while not having a trace
of sainthood in myself. I am looked after, provided forl I allow my-


self to be rocked in Her lap, I never follow my own willi I let life
transpire, this is my secret! With a soupçon of sainthood I would not be
So fortunate: that is, She would feel no need to look after me. But,
as I am, giddy with Her betitching powers, helplessly bewitched from the
moment I clap eyes on the living day, a special place in Her watchful
heart is kept for me. I am not a mere plaything in Her hands but almost
like those who have challenged her lovely wit tcherses and found the Lady
Herself, sporting quietly in her golden roomse I shall never know Her.
Which makes Her all the more attentive that I shall not be lost to the
chances of her bewitching machinery, but shall be preserved, even while
I am being tortured, like a sort of royal pig. Better, I think, than just
being a pig. Though there is the story of God putting Himself inside a
pig and enjoying it SO much that he had to be more or less dragged out
of his pigskin back to heaven. Didn't you say just now how happy you
were to have found reality again, and put gour nose once more in the
pigswill?
Get thee to an analyst, go!
Nor can any peace be lasting that is sought in external affairs.
Who spoke?
At the hospital today: he saw the extent of my liberation.
I put the grapes, cut just that afternoon, icy from the sudden autumn
((lt is laki
and He fisteating gropon ave out- ft not autumn)).
hailstorm, close to maten léft hand. He was sleeping. He started at
the icy touch. What has happened to me? I can serve him night and
day without resentment. And he sees that he prefers to be served with
resentful firel He misses the fire that used to flash from my eyes,
and could turn so thrillingly to fires of desire! The one can hardly
be had without the other. So Sophia's magic touch, which I never want
to feel again, did work, only slowly. I am free now of him and herl
But what have I been liberated into? It miskes me afraidi I feel no


desire. I potter about our empty house in a self-contained mood but
there are no particular thoughts in my head. As usual, I hardly sleep.
Beware of the sleepless, somebody once tald Sophia. Perhaps he was right.
I realise what power there has always been in me, mostly between my legs.
I never want to think again! I ammmdare I say it?-happy! I have
found a sort of stilleess which I never knew existed. It puts me in
harmony with the still garden outside, where the water of the poàl round
his chipped head of Hermes never changes its expression even by a flicker.
I could easily never return to New York, or alternatively never return here
from there. Now I understand why he feels safer at hospital than here at
homel For he has no homel 'Home is te wrman'!
I clean the house and wash the sheets with my own hands, and bring
the breakfast tray to her room. Her# eyes are less tired in the morning
since he went into hospital. My son says I am the last woman on the
island to be doing the sheets at the washing-place by the fountain.
He says they can easily afford a washing machine like all the other villas
on the island. I told him I shall never entrust sheets to a machine.
I have never read a book, but the unlearned are saved from the grip of
the devil of self-infatuation. The unlearned are saved from the sickness
of a thousand whirling thoughts and words! Saved from running after
wealth! My son's eyes are worn like an old man'sl He follows me through
the rooms of the Aaron villa staring at all their precious things, the
pictures that are supposed to be worth more than the cost of the island,
the bronze creatures that sometimes make me feel afraid, and he has his
teeth clenched! All because he went to schooll It is from more than
one evil that the unlearned are saved. I am one of the last creatures
here who cannot read or write. How my parents managed to keep me away
from school I shall never remember, but they were cleverer than any
government. My name is Miranda and I have long black hair which my


husband unties with a laugh at night.
I wonder why Miss Sophia never comes to the house now. At first
when I saw her she frightened me. She said, Here, Miranda, tomorrow I
bring you a lovely shawll And she did. Her singing makes me feel good,
it sounds like a man. She makes me feel strange. I think I would like
to touch her. But she isn't natural. I feel sorry for her. She never
goes with men. I say to my husband, What's wrong with that? think of all
the nuns there arel She is aike a Mother Superior there used to be on
the island, we called her La Baffetta because of her moustache. She
told my sister that when she was a girl she spread pigeon shit all over
her face to make her hair grow. She wanted to be like a man. But my
husband likes everything clear. We laugh about it. He tickles me in
bedr
Here I am sitting in the dusk, gazing over the tops of the olive
trees, dreaming of my sailor boys I was never bold enough so much as to
touch! They used to leave my emptied-out, but not in the way Sophia
would understand by that. I was worn out by my own subterfuges, which
I myself too found horriblel If they moved closer to me on the sofa
I reached for the cigar box and stuffed one in their mouths. If they
stood in the doorway when I wanted to pass-they often tried that one
I simply turned back as if I'd forgotten something. They left exhausted
tool But it wasnlt my subterfuges that kept them off my body. It was
my poisel That damnecimperial poise was my cursel Young men fell in
love with it by the dozen. I suppose a number of them even committed
syicide. I was full of honour, you know-all that rot, just to keep
Britain's monopoly in certain raw materials! It sort of de-womanised
us. It spelled one thing in most of us-frigity. The sailors never
really and truly fell in love with me. They cottoned on pretty soon,
and went round the corner for a whore. They stayed friends with me.


They felt a compasionate affection. pery seldom did they try anything
on, once they'd understood. When they did it was because they simply
couldn't believe that a woman of my beauty, a woman with hips and breasts
like mine, could not have something in store for them. Of course they
believed secretly that I had simply not been provoked in the right way:
they hoped to be the pioneer. They asked about my husband-my two hus-
bands. I pretended some kind of marital fidelity, but they saw through
that. They just smiled and nodded. I know what they called me, behind
my back. The Mule. Meaning the childless one. It was said without
malice. As for the English kids who feal in love with me, they were all
out of the top drawer, and quite opposite the sailors, in their sentiment-
alism and sloppiness (which no doubt causes the female frigidity).
My detachment from anything fleshly, combined with my avid interest in all
fleshly subjects, struck the right perverted note for them, I suppose.
Only Sophia opened me up, though she never satisfied me. The fact that
she didn't-couldn't-was why she fascinated me, and why I stayed with
her, and why-lovely contradictictions--she satisfied me more than any
other human being I have known. Her magnetic fleshliness, which of course
is mostly tbeatre, and her lack of any frightening male demands, were
exactly what I was after. It is years now since we 'had anything' as
they say. Soon I shall knock the chair over, just before I go to bed,
because she expects me to, so that she may pity me for my awkwardness.
What tragedy there is in the world. How the earth steams with it,
groans with it. And those absurd deaths. Three of my brothers in
two world warse And the concentration camps. How can God tolerate
it, indeed create it?
He is inside you. Therefore aren't you accusing yourself?
Was that a male or female who spoke?
I know that when the poor darling knocks over her chair she is


helplessly drunk, stumbling towards the olive grove in the hope of
finding what she never had-youth! For me the sound of that falling
chair is the sound of her terror of old age, and my heart is torn each
time. She always stops at the french windows. She never actually goes
into the olive grove. She never so much as crosses the terrace. The
terror, far from abating, bursts into something like panic, and she dashes
back into the dark room, to feel her way towards another stiff drink which
is taken up to bede I often want to tell her, Renounce all and you shall
find all. But she would take this to mean a phrase from her own idiotic
imperial education such as 'give up the world', lhereas renunciation means
only giving up the egol The ego is the reservoir of all terrors, and
te tetrors
notably thass of time and old agel The ego insists on calling itself
life-and, worse than that, the only lifel Why is it given to me to
know this when I have never renounced a morsel of the ego myself, and
could never do so? when I smart with resentment when a man comes in the
room, and cannot let go of the whirling thoughts of revenge that crowd
into my head? when I wake up sometimes with a fury inside me like a
hurricane? A kay may lie in a curious fact about me: I take at least
two, sometimes three hours to wake up in the morning. This contradicts
what I am always saying about how I wake up singing. But I mean tr I
wakine up about three hours after I get out of bed. At first I am simply
not conscious, even while walking about. Half a litre of black coffee
makes little difference, nor does the din of conversation. Each morning
I take a new FRE journey back to life, from what seems a dark country
of sleep situated eternities
I away, and into which I plunge,
dreamless and all but unwakeable, the moment I put my head on the pillow
at night. In this sense I am a visitor to life, I mean consciously a


visitor, and while a prisoner to space and time like most other people
I am still aware of my life as only a short visit among many others.
I am not foolish enough! to see the ego as all of life, or even as alive
at all in the proper sense. I see my life as one of an endless series
of lives. I often think to myself, What a mess I have made of 'this one',
assuming that I have many more choices before ma. Thus the I that spans
all the lives is quite different from the I of one life, which is only
an outer skin. This is why they sometimes call me 'the Greek", I
cannot basically take the extermal world as real. Only the egp can do
that. When you cease to take it as real-here lies the reward-you
begin to create itl
It is news to me that anyone ever called her 'the Greek", but
perhaps I have missed something. Certainly her doctrine of rebirth is
Pythagorean and not Indian in origin. Cassandra is a Greek enthusiast.
Perhaps during their long conversations under ceiling fans in Tangiers
Sophia learned something from her-a further step to learning about
hersalf. Again and again Sophia, as she herself says, 'talks with
someone else's voice', and this is due, I think, to her tregendous
capacity for absorbing people in their real selves, while paying no
attention to their behaviour or their talk. She 'cannot understand'
on Hant talking and behaving level, as Cassandra says.
I knocked over the chair dutifullys and walked as usual to the


french windows to take a breath of night air. I always do this before
going to bed 8o as to have a good belche I find the fresh air brings it
upe Then I feel my way across the derk room (unexplained ritual requires
that I never switch on the light) to get myself a glass of mineral water
"to wash the evening out of your system' as the doctor told me. Then
as I lie down on my bed upstairs with relief, not yet undressing because
I want to contemplate that dusty silence outside the window, I make a
kind of compact with death, I embrace it as something in life, I make
sure that it will never take me unawares but visit me as a friende
Thank God I have nevar suffered from fear of old age.
I was astonished at myself but I cerried the tiny bottle of pills all
the way to the hospital. I never for a moment seriously believed that
I would leave them on his bedside table but I dide That marning, befare
leaving the house (and after sending Miranda to pick basil), I searched
through the dog's medical cupboard in the spare room and folnd Diarysticin
500, which contains penicillin and other allergy-inducing substances.
I dared not go so fer as to tip the tablets into another bottle. I
popped them into my bag and left the house, intending nothing more than


that I should have them in my bag. I found myself putting them among
the other tablets on his table. There they sat, clearly marked in india
ink DOG TABLETS. He hardly opened his eyes. I told one of the brides of
Christ that I would return later when he was less sleepy. I almost danced
into the sun and-while I knew no real harm could come to him, and that the
tablets were easily 'tolerated' as the packet said-I felt even more lib-
erated than before, even more estranged from myself, from that SAAE
non-existent creature I have never been able to find (and whose relation-
ships-with Sophia, with Aaron-I even began to find tiresome!). All
my life I have had a floating sensation, which most of my friends have put
down to my never having had to worry about money. But now I have cut
adrift. The floating now seems right, and I don't care where I drift too
The only connection I have with this self of mine is my body, which con-
tinues to walk and function. This is my only assurance that I exist.
After starting my third newspaper (I read the two international
editions first, then the local paper) I heard my wife run into the house
with footsteps that denoted she was looking for meo I kept reading hard
(it was yesterday's crime passionel, in the back room of a bakery) but
there she was in front of me all of a sudden, asking had I heard what
had happened at the hospital? The nuns had given Aaron the wrong pills!
They were treating him for pneumonia when he has heart troublel A fever
had sprung up. He was back on the danger list. Now perhaps people will
listen when advise them to fly to the mainland when they fall sick
rather than entrust themselves to the mercy of women whose thoughts are
centred on death rather than lifel My wife and I sat quietly over our
coffee for a time, talking about the dangers of follawimng anything but
the sober facts in life. Wasn't it obvious, I said, that when you wanted
proper medical treatment you should go to the men who believed in prolonging
were
this life rather than to those whosel sights a on the next? She gave me


a quick look of admiration at this nicely rounded phrase.
He insisted on being removed as soon as the fever went downe I had
to be at the hospital at eight sharp, with a chauffeur and car and blankets,
though he was really too weak to leave his bed. The hospital is in alarm.
Three doctors and the professor have been at his bedside. Two or three
conferences were called, and sisters interviewed, to decide how Diocrysticin
500 could find its way to his bedside table. The brides of Christ have
been arguing like fishwives, and of course none of them will take the blame
since none of them is to blamel I sympathise inwardly but can do nothing
about it. I could say that I left the tablets inadvertently, meaning to
use them on the dog, but apart from the improbability it is too late nowe
I thought he gave me a knowing look or two, and I notice that he isn't as
full of biblical recrimination as usual. It seems that we know where we
stand vis-devis each other, and I am happy for its There won't be a state
of war at home, for the simple reason that I have no enemyl He is the
defeated, and I the army of occupation! Son of man, the house of Israel
is to me become dross. All they are brass, and tin, and iron, and lead,
in the midst of the furnacel Oh what have I said?


A GARDEN INCLOSED
What happens when a woman plants dog-pills at her husband's
bedside without the smallest murderous intent? Well, he takes them
or he doesn't. He did. She meant him to-and he was meant to. The
bottle was clearly enough marked, in india ink, DOG TABLETS. Of course
the sisters knew no English. But Aaron was sufficiently recopvered to
know what he was doing. He actually takes up an unfamiliar bottle and
pops two tablets of an unfamiliar shape (his prescribed tablets were taken
with meals only, and were shingy and round and variously coloured, while
these were flat and white) into a quite unsuspecting mouthl Clearly
history needed him for its next move. The pressure of future events
may blind a person momentarily, if he happens to be in a key position
where history can use him. His wife's will workede And-what did
it achieve for Aaron? Nothing but a fever (not quite true, as we shall
see). For herself? Nothing but his unwanted return home-A What
she did achieve was something for Sophial She changed her lifeshe
kad
brought about a dénouement for which Sophia
- oeue been waiting
for years. She brought her back to the convent! This is an example-
the first we have had-where someone may become infatuated in order to
serve someone else's destiny! For Sophia the dog-pills achieve the
momentous! For when the momentous is to be achieved, servants rush


forward and prostrate themselves before the coming event, help comes
from every sidel
The convent is really a wing of the hospital, that great white
fortress which fishing vessels have used for centuries to guide them-
selves back to port. You could easily miss the convent as it is the
earliest part of the whole structure, its separate humped refectory-
building and the crumbling cloister stretching back to the twelfth cent-
ury. The cells are relatively new, from the fifteenth century. The
arches are in some places so low that only the smaller of the sisters
can pass through without dycking- EM not those from north of the Alps
like sisters Brigitte, Olive and the Mother Superior herself. The
Mother Superior, dark-haired still, despite her seventy-odd years,
straight-backed, with that 'steady gaze' which mystics work so hard for,
with
a slender, pale hands, her handsome face quite unworn with anxiety,
though she is a little restrained round the lips, her chin strong with
out being squared or rough--we rarely see such a woman outside convents
nowadays, let alone in theme She has not seen the rest of the island
since four years ago, when she left the mainland hospital, and the long
walks she refers to in one of her narratives must - now take place in
her enclosed garden. The convent, being enclosed, has little connection
with the hospital that towers over its humble tiled roofs, except in the
function of providing beneficial prayers. The sisters speak to the
outside world through an iron grille, and are veiled when they do So.
Islanders have the quaint habit of leaving their troueers at this grille
to be mended. Sewing and invisible mending have been a convent-art for
as long as the island can remember. Still, the connection of trousers with
conventual life is an odd one, and the tradition only survives today
because the Church rightly dislikes abandoning mercies which cost nothing,
and even bring in a little money. The Mother Superior, being by birth


a Berliner, finds the tradition touching, though when she joined the
convent she did put out a request that the trousers should be cleaned
before becoming enclosed. She risked being thought over-Prussian, but
no one could but melt in her company. Everyone knew about her work at
the hospital.
Her office lay behind the cloister, out of sight to the towering
hospital, which on this side, being constructed on the slope of a hill,
consists of massive slim arches that sustain the whole building, tunnelled
deep into the hill and looking like black decayed teeth. Her office and
adjacent cell also look out on an enclosed garden, walled all round,
though the walls are invisible to her because of the profusion of oleander,
broom, palm-trees, cypresses and umbrella pines that distil and cool the
sunlight and make the damp crawl up her walls in the autumne It was to
the office, its french windows looking straight into this garden, that
Sophia was called, and below it is the Renegade who tells us about it
first.
I have just received the astonishing news that the Mother Superior
of the convent down the hill sent for Sophia of all people to clear up
the mess. She is a lady of German origin, and is no doubt most anxious
her
punctilious kraut way to get to the bottom of the mistaken pills.
I am against renunciation and medicine being practised together (rather
neat, that?), but I must say I understand her feelings. I imagine
she thinks of Sophia as still being in close relationship with the Aaron
family, hoping that she will pour oil on what could become very troubled
waters for the hospital, and little knowing that they quarrelled at least


five years ago. But news travels slow in the conventual worlde My
saying this put my wife in a giggly moode I added, imitating the old
patrgiarch himself, that Mother Superior might soon be saying like Achish


unto his servants, Have I need of madmen that ye have brought this fellow
to play the madman in my presence? She went into screams of laughter.
Being so deeply bewitched by life I bewitch others. I have often
said it. Why,
with me but two
and
Hoy.
astranger
days
all my problems
have suddenly become hist He begins thinking with my head! Back in
New York or St Raphael or Amsterdam he asks a common friend, Has Sophia
fixed her drains-problem yet? has she got rid of that lush who pisses his
trousers at dinner table? has she sold that little terracotta piece on
which her next years finances depend? was it really a mquette for a Bernini
fountain? is Cassandra still stealing her whisky? did that Greek charlatan
she picked up with really overpaint a da Fredi madonna in her chapel?
And the questions come out with a certain hard possessiveness too, as
to say, My own fate is caught up with these things you knowl And all
because I am hopelessly intoxicated! How can I kelp passing it on?
If I were intoxicated like a saint they wouldn't come near me. But
intoxication with mortal objects, why, that is what they've always lived
to achieve!
Little wonder that especially the women, so close by nature to the
mortal objects, get giddy. I may say that te German women all but
faintl Some extraordinarily supernatural interchange takes place between
us! It happened the moment I walked into the Mother Superior's office.
Oh, thy neck was as a tower of ivory, thine eyes like the fishpools of
Bathrabbim, thy nose as the tower of Lebabnon which looketh towards
Damascus! And the white habit that stretched to the ground! the starched
headpiece! The hands held slightly together in trusting reposel How
beautiful were thy feet with shoes, 0 prince's daughter! the joints of
thy thighs were like jewels, the work of the hands of a cunning workman!
Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine armi TVEE
urer-TabiUIEMUSL U VE sleintelel
HET


I strode into the room like Elijah the Tishbite before the pro-
phesied drought of Israell She came forward, her delicate hands still
clasped lightly together over her spotless habit. I remembered, The
Germans are so clean! I had all but taken a shower in lavender water myself
nowl
that morning, and, d,made her acquaintance in, so to speak, a heavenly cloud.
I had expected hygiene too, it being a hospital. But this was no puritan
or Lutheran eitherl-this was
pre-war mountain stream, previous to
pollution! She was indeed the living denial of all poison, indeed all
death! No destruction could befall her because she was not her body!
She-I mean the real she-shone from inside herself, suddenly making it
seem that the sun was drenching the tall palm trees outside only because
of her! A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouses a spring shut up,
a fougntain sealed! She knew quite well that I had hardly seen the Aarons
in five or more years. News travels fast in the conventual worldi
To my astonishment she even knew about our New York quarrels. She
sensed, I think, that the slim one had loved me. And so pure was this
Hessian handmaid of God that she seemed to feel a sympathy for him,
Aaron, and to be sweetly accusing me. I have never been accused so
tenderlyl She put the tiny bottle of pills in my hand. Had I seen it
before? Of course, I said, it was prescribed by the vet for Silvia,
an airedale bitch I had bought them as a present in Maine onces More,
I said-I purchased those tablets myself in St Raphael. It had been
for some ear-trouble, after Silvia's second litter. Well, Mother
Superior said, they appeared on his bedside table, and he took #some.
And that was why he was suddenly back on the danger list!
Appeared on his table? I asked. Good God, is she still up to her
life-and-death tricks? And I laughed in my special way that makes the
earth seem to be dancing. Apparently, Mother Superior said, she is.
And now we have solved that little mystery, would you like to take a very


special cup of coffee with me? We moved to another room-I might say
a tabernacle! We were behind the enclosure, not in the hospital wing,
and the room gave out on to a garden so thick with oleander and yellow
jasmine and mimosa and broom and cooling umbrella pines that you could
hardly see any limit to it, no fence or wall. And not another human
creature. And a silence-I mean, a deafening chorus of birds--like
the unveiling of reality itselfi Far from the outside world being the
reality, it at once became for me the most ghastly illusion, and this
world the only truthi We sat together, and I discovered why she called
the coffee very special. The secret of the convent, a generations-old
alchemy of well-water, the coffee-bean roasted with loving care,
filtered by ten der handsl We hardly talked. As in water face answer-
eth to face, so the heart of man a to mant a
In the above we certainly have a few of Sophia's dramatic exagger-
ations. The Mother Superior could not know of quarrels which had never
taken place, nor have defended Aaron for his part in a situation that was
purely imaginary. As for her knowing 'that the slim one loved me', that
is quite impossible. As for the mistake of calling the Mother Superior
'Hessian'-well, Sophian business-journeys to Frankfurt have probably
outweighed those to any part of Prussia. The conversation with the
Mother Superior sounds altogether too slick to be convincing. She
hands me the dog-pills, I say Ahl so she is up to her old tricks again
is she?, to which the Mother Superior replies, Yes, I suppose she ist
and then, Well, now we've solved that little mystery let's have a cup
of special convent coffeel No, I doubt if the dog-pills were actually


shown her. She probably was asked about Silvia, the airedale bitch,
and probably the Mother Superior did conclude that Aaron's atrnge wife-
she was known to everyone on the island as rather E daffy
had planted them. But I cannot believe she told Sophia Soa She did
invite Sophia to her rinfresco, though. She did at once see that an
astonishing individual had come into her life. And who knows that she
had not achieved e the summit of her destiny too? that she had always
wanted to meet Sophia, after so much talk about her, especially from the
peasant families who brought their trousers in? So Aaron's wife's
strange action has penetrated deep.
I may be alone in this but I find something over-luxuriant in
Sophia's decpriptions of the convent. She is like this when fres
othinrse
it lasts only a moment-of the negative forces that tt hold her
downe We must not think that she is living the dream, in the sense
that there is nothing else on her minde Actually, even while visiting
the convent and staying the whole days she seems to get quite a lot of
work done. Cassandra exaggerates when she says that Sophia 'left the
telegrams'. She also implies that the armies of people waiting to come
and see Sophia are pleasure-seekers. They are business contacts, on the
wholeo But this is the point about Sophia--and most of the other
characterslors their work is simply)basso continuo of the reality of
their leisure hours. Even Cassandra is busy each day at the fishing
port or the harbour, organising medical care for infants---she omits to
tell us in her narratives that she was a Queen Alexandra nurse in the
second world war. We can easily get the wrong impression that these
people are idle rich. They are sometimes idle and sometimes rich,
neitkar
but = for very long.
As to Sophia's over-luxuriant style, it becomes pithy and pointed
moment
resentment and its outrider guilt invade her again.


Mother Superior invited me to a rinfresco as she calls it, when
the 3isters (they don't work in the hospital) come into the garden
for ices and lemon drinks. An enclosure, they. call itl For me they
would better call it a gate to freedom! It is the world outside that
now seems enclosed to me. Here, inside the conventual walls, I feel
unloosed-what shall I say?-like a herol Yes, as I walked across the
gardens towards the long trellis table where the brides of Christ bustled
round in their billowing habits, tall ones and graceful ones and shy ones
and audacious ones and luscious ones, I found myself suddenly in a heroic
new role I had never so much as dreamt of beforel How She reveals Her new
wonderst And always more daring! How they clustered round mel I
smelled their clothes, even their sweet cloistered breath, even their
tenderly closed thoughts! I was in a seventh heaven of excitement as
Mother Superior pilotted me round among them! Giddyl I could have
laughed, danced, swept the fattest of them round in my arms, so much
power was I suddenly given, feasting my eyes on two dozen enclosed
treasures! My God, to be enclosed with all this, all day-could there


be more in heaven itself-I mean, how absurd the idea of heaven after
life, when life itself has all the heaven we shall ever requirel To
VVV
taste each one, moving from fruit to fruit like a bee, and theng when each
has been tasted, to move back to the first again, for a second and sweeter
savouring! I felt plundered by them, sweetly jostled, deliciously
cornered! Their habits, I discovered, were of a uniform cloth-but not
they themselves! Each was a universe! For thou didst separate them
from among all the people of the earth, to be thine inheritancel
I arrived home exhausted as the sun was going down, not,all refreshed,
as the Mother Superior had promised in her word rinfeesco! I was ravaged!
Cassandra, moving darkly about the lounge, peered at me and asked where
the devil I'd beene When I told her, To the convent, to a sort of garden
party of theirs, she put a stiff whisky in my hand with a sympathetic
glance--sans rocks, sans water, sans anything! I took several, and
spent the whole evening remounting for myself the splendour of the after-
noon-the swish of every habit, the touch of hands, the burning sweetness
of ohl too many eyes! How impossible it all seemed, how deliriously
unthinkable-that there was no law against the unenclosed entering the
enclosed! I think there cannot have been a Roman emperors nor a queen,
not even Messalina herself, who feasted so unstintedly on the senses as I
did that afternoon. In the dark lounge, at Cassandra's side, I sat deep
in a beach chair, gazing into the shadoy world of olive trees, giddy
with my bouquet of memories, drugged by their heavy jasmine perfumes!
And I will make them and the places round about my hill a blessings there
shall be showers of blessing! Thank God I never believed in-never really
perceived--this reality they talk about! Why worship a cardboard moon
when there is the real one to shine her sisterly light? The outside of
things, the touchable husk, is only cardboard! But touch the inside and
the spark will light your lifel


Standing among those fragrant brides of Christ I shuddered to think
that it had ever been necessary to invent an absurd thing like 'history'l
I felt I had always been standing there-and would be there again and again
through all eternity, that I had never really come and so would never really
gol I knew them alll We had met before aeons ago, and recently as well.
We had, in fact, only been separate from each other in space and timel
Sipping my lemon drink, letting my ears bask in the sweetly enclosed garden-
gossip, I realised that the past and the future are simply convenient forms
of intellectual arrangement, like using a toruh in the Adark. We are
living in eternity! Later, with a shock, haff-drunk, slumped in the
beach-chair at Cassandra's side, I realised that you acquired stillness
only when you realised this. That night I slept even more than usually like
the deads and intne morning, plodding mopainfnt
through coffee after
coffee back to the attics of daylight again, bending under the effort more
than ever before, I knew that I was condemned never to escape those senuual
claws by which wB are pinned to the illusion of birth and death, while
knowing the means of liberation from those claws as if I had invented them
myself! That is, I acknowledge I shall never be free of egn-infatuation.
Surely the kernel of any infatuation with those fragrant brides lay in my
being among them? I mean, there could be no infatuation on my side were it
not for my consciousness also of my own thrilling presence! So we love
more easily those we suspect of loving ourselves! Were I capable of
worshipping those enclosed sweethearts without ego, then I would be wor-
shipping God Himselfi
The day after my visit was a blue void for me. Nothing happened,
nothing was felt. I shuffled through the house in a chemise and old
sandals. Even when Cassandra appeared as usual dressed for dinner about
sundown (I mean she puts on a string of pearls and combs her hair) I
remained where I was slumped in a chair. She gave me one of her beautiful
long kindly glances that rested on my half-naked body like an angel's hand.


That night too I flung myself on my bed like a sack of grain, and lay
among the dead all night. Resurrection came in the morning! The house
blazed with a new light, the jasmine smells filled our rooms like a promise
of future magic atmospheres which I must not yet even guess at. The
bronze pieces, glowing gold-copper, wanted to dance on their marble stands,
and the sun shouted encouragement through the corridors. I found myself
dressing quickly, tipping half the lavender MEEHER bottle over my person,
and striding, fresher and cleaner than I had felt for years, towards the
convent. I had now learned my part! I was speech-perfect, rehearsed
down to the last gesture. Oh Mother Superior! I will be more jealous
hen
of thee than a Barbary cock-pigeon over his hansl, more giddy in my desires
than a monkey!
I hear she appears at the convent almost every day, and has all but
taken the vow. It is all a mad mistake on the Mother Superior's part of
course. She believes Sophia to be a member of the Aaron family still,
and
aNB hopes to hvpe her influence against a possible lawsuit. She invites
her almost every day, keeps her there for hours-not presumably for praying
or fasting, much less confessing, for I cannot imagine that a devout thought
ever went through Sophia's head. (As for a confession, that would burn
Mother Superior's ears offl) So here we have the spectacle of two human
beings clasped together in an utterly false relationship. How often this
must happen in life. The one hoping so much of the other. While only
further harm can be incurred, for both. What does Sophia hope for, in
this case? Well, she might be priming the Mother Superior for her legal
defence, knowing the Aarons as she does. And that is all grist to her
mill. It would be her final triumph over them, to see them paying vast
court costs at the end of a squashed lawsuit. Meanwhile Mother Superior
pours coffee and iced drinks down the ever-open hermephrgdite gullet in
order (quite understandably) to pervert the course of justice in defence
of her negligent girls. I often have occasion to thank God that fate


chose a business career for me, where relationships are measured in terms
of dollar levels and not emotions. That measure may be despised but it
puts one by way of being able to penetrate matters to the truth, in that
it gives one a clear head. I notice that for all her praying and her
attention to the true path, the Mother Superior is fooled in the smallest
details of life.
My sister tells me that Miss Sophia is down at the convent every day
and they are all entranced with her. She tells her beads, she is on her
knees for hours on end, she even attends vespers, and one day she insisted
on sweeping out the chapel with Sister Teresa, whose duty-day it was. My
sister (who helps with the refectory) heard Mother Superior say that Solpia
would never take the VOW but was worthier to do so than many she could think
of behind the enclosure. Sophia might not be poor, she said, but was
'chaste and obedient'. She is thinking of asking Sophia to become a lay-
sister. My husband says that in view of the money Sophia has to spend he
doesn't wonder at this. He says that convents sniff for endowments like
bitches in season for dogse The master is back again, and could hardly
walk into the house. My sister says she thinks it was Sister Mahatma who
made the mistake over the tablets. The other sisters call her 'the
Mohammedan'. It was because she hates the Jews, my sister says.
Cassandra looks at me with almost frightened eyes when I slip out of
the house in the morning, sometimes soon after dawn, when the olive trees
are beginning to whisper to each other and the sunflowers turn their heads
towards their rising king in the sky. I say 'slip out of the house' but
I am too powerfully built to slip anywhere, unless it is on the floor.
But I have been given the winged heels of Mercury in the last few days!
Now I know the meaning of what someone said to me once at an auction in
Buffalo, We illumine the universel I thought nothing of it at the time.
He happened to have been looking at a Lehmbruck figure when he said this,
and I thought the remark entirely apropos of that slim youth's body in


stone, his arms slightly folded together. And now the remark returns,
and I realise that all such remarks always are in a context which divert
that leretendy to)
us from their meaning for ourslves, until such time wien they ean be
evoked as experience. I nww know why there is more light for me in
convent
jasmane-scented) /garden than there is in the rest of the sunny island.
I know that a great sustaining light is emitted from all creatures, and that
tkan
if this is forgotten or denied, eF we forget or deny our real identity, and
the earth goes dark, and the world begins to destroy itself precisely as$
the creature has eclipsed himself. Light is not the light we mean because
without ourselves it would illumine nothing! We govern the universe with
that light! We penetrate objects with it!
For a whore is a deep ditch, and a strange woman is a narrow pit.
Who said that?
Mother Superior delights to see me go down on my knees and say vespers,
and stay sometimes for hours long in the chapel in silent prayer, all but
buried from sight, in a great motionless heap in the second rowe She does
not realise that I could just as well be turning somersaults or screaming
with laughter or rubbing dust in my hair, because any activity of worship
is the same, given a proper root!. At the same time I am in turmoil, keep-
ing in mind the fact that the earth will not let me go with its sensual
claws, and that for me the light must be transmuted into earthly ecstasies.
Given my destiny, I feel apprehensive. And I feel mocked, desperately
mocked, insidel
The truth is out. My wife got it from the man repairing our irrigation
pipes. It was an Arab girl who planted the dog-tablets. Yes! She took
the vow, she laid her life and her virginity at the feet of a dead Jew,
put she kept a place in her heart for a race-hatred thatho doubt entered
her blood with her mother's milk! All day I was haunted by the thought
that really we ought to move elsewhere. How to feel safe with that woman
dispensing poisons not three hundeed yards away, and perhaps with accomplices?


How far was she tacitly supported by the Mother Superior, who is German
in origin? And-the thought made me leap up from my cane chair-is
Sophia behind it all? She had the greatest possible interest in plant-
ing poison! There is no man she hates more vehemently on this earth.
And what better place for the crime than one run by our religious enemies
(who signed concordats with Mussolini and Hitler). What a fool Aaron
was to put himself in their hands!
Am I a wicked woman? I can say with Lady Macbeth, What's done is
done. Yet I feel as innocent as a spring lamb. As for my husband, he
looks better every day, his eyes are getting back their fierce, self-
vindicating look, now that the island is aflame with gosspp about Sister
Mahatma. I find I feel quite unsorry for him. What is this new terrible
coolness in me? I enjoy his not grasping the truthi I even feel like
planting the dog-tablets a second time, in order to say that Sophia must
have employed a second Arab accomplicel I joke to myself about these
frightful things. But everything serious falls through my fingerst
I could plan # my own harm just as coolly. Yet I don't intend to harm him
any more. It was only a joke! Just so that I could enjoy a real secret,
and test the world's powers of divination. He gazed at me with those
fierce eyes this morning and said, his teeth clenched, For the Lord shall
comfort Sion, He will comfort all her waste places, and he will make her
wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lordi That
was supposed to be a speech against Mahatma (who was actually brought up by
a devout Italian family in @ Tunip, so they say!) I nodded like I
always used to, as if his words were penetrating me slowly. For two
years in the Harlem apartment I was forbpdden to use the word Jew. It
had to be Hebrew*. Now I could not to anything! Somewhere I feel a
tiny ache of sorrof that Sophia should be denounced for feelings she


could never have-I mean he has started calling her 'Dachau' instead of
'S', and I feel myself tugged into a pit of regret which attached me to her
for a passing moment. Is it possible that she is my only real attachment?
Could it not be that she guided my hands towards the dog-pills? Something
strange is happening to the world. Are you not moved, when all the sway
of earth shakes like a thing unfirm?
All night I dreamt of Mahatma. I saw her black eyebrows as meeting
in the middle, showing a disposition to anger (I suppose her eyebrows are
pitch-black). And the eyes were drawn into slits wide with murderous
intent. In her dazzling white teeth-I suppose she has white teethl-
she gripped a gleaming scimitar of a kipd I once saw in a Damascus souk.
In her arms, embraced like a new-born child, lay a small detonators she
only had to make two wires meet and all of us would la up in the
air! I was just about to ask her (how absurd to say crisp things in such
danger-but dreams are like that, aren't they?), Are you suicidal as well
as destructive? when I woke up to hear the coffee-grinder screaming away
in the kitchen. It stopped and the island-silence returned--but like a
friend with poison in his heartl Yes, the island has been poisoned for
mel I can still see her relentless, narnowed eyes, from the dreamp If
only I could rid myself of this nightmare which stretches back to my early
manhood! Once an over-talkfative, over-clever financial wizard (and a
Jew himself) said to me, Maybe analysis would do you good, you over-identify
yourself with the word Jew, and all over-identification is bad. Perhaps
he was right! Anyway, he added (and had not a big loan been dependent
entirely on him I would have sniffed in my contemptuous way), Analysis was
invented by Jews for Jews. In that case, I said quietly, keeping respect
in my face, we have all become Jews. You can say that again, he said-
and I got my loan. When I say he was over-clever I mean he wrote a book
on economics trying to warn everybody about stretching the ancient Church
HerERRES


law against usury too far, and addressing it to 'the unhappy few'-that
sort of thing. Usury, he said, is any interest on capital lent. I said,
No, it's exorbitant interest. He said, No, that's the meaning it's been
given just to save our faces. But oh this knife in my hearti
A cataclysmic thing is happening. Nothing in my life gave me warning
of it. Each time I sit with the Mother Superior in her garden, or bend
my knees in the company of sisters Teresa, Bianca, Maria, Esmeralda, Olive,
Hanni or Brigitte I begin to feel a smouldering resentment, grotesque in
such a place but no less burning for that, ageinst the One of whom they
are the brides! Yes! On the cross, his poor head hanging, the wound
in his side a gruesome red, he silently repudiates my feeling. But still
he has those parts, under the loincloth, parts which I can only find-
struggling against it as hard as I can--compromisinal I even find that
some of my psychological patteras with married couples are cropping up here
too. I suddenly turned away when Sister Esmeralda mentioned Him once,
giving her a quick black glance that made her feel a confused sanse of
wrong-doing. And I whispered to Teresa, just when she was about to renew
the altar cloth, But look after yourself for oncel drawing her down from
the chancel with a long caring look that made her feel she was over
dedicated/ cndae like a housewte who watches her husband gorge her
succulent meals without so much as a thankyofe, while her life drains
away in a smell of roast. Don't wprry, I seemed to be saying, He'll
always be there, waiting on his cross, so why not take a little time off?
And once I hinted to Mother Superior that the sense of having a Enat Divine
Husband was necessary perhaps for - a other simple creatures but not for
wal
her, whose mind a able to rest placidly in the Godhead! What a fearful
way of dressing Christ down! She, gave me an understanding smile and went
on with her ledgers. Bitterly aware of what I am up to, I pray for hours
alone in the chapel, begging Him for forgiveness. But to do that I have


to think of Him as Her! Yes! I pray to Her who was crucified! And
his
have to blot out those terrible parts that lie between the legs! I try
to pray them away! Or I think of the piêta where he is already in the
Madonna's arms, and dead,
his poor bent body
ing
droopp from the cross ttt rod now useless, chollenging me no mete.
Every time I hear of her spending the day at the convent the knife
Srme black
gives a twist in my heart! No doubt she is down there working out gt)
racial doctrine with Sister Mahatmal What waves of ignorance cross the
worldl How can we hope for peace and balanced economies and the death
of inflation when our hearts are so croaked?
a are driven by wild
demons! It reminds/of Peter Lorre in that film M, how he said, Always
there is this evil force inside mel ft's there all the time, driving me
out to wender in the streets-yes, to murder children! Perhaps Adolf
Hitler was right. Brutality is respected, he once said-the people
need wholesome fear, he said, they want someone to frighten them, the
masses need something that will give them a thrill of horror! Was he
wrong? Now that the masses rule the earth, what do you see on your
cinema
and s television screens but crime, crime, pastiness
and beastliness, and murder, and the police chasel I said all this to
my wife and she said, In that case why do you spend so much of your time
reading thrillers? After that I kept my mouth shut, the knife locked in
my heart. People either understand or they don't.
I think of her night and day (it's still me speaking) down there in
black conference with Sister Mahatma. They say it's awful at the convent,
behind what they call the enclosure, a hotbed of ignorance and unclean
sheeta.
bdk
The Mother Superior has a pokey little plot of sandy earth with
a few bedraggled palm trees and some broom running wild. There is damp
in the chapel, and it stinks, swealing the stink of centuries of foul
cooking. Even the nuns stink, I dare say, given their traditional horror


of any form of washing. The local priest stinks like a pole-cat,
that I do know. Either it's his black teeth, his unwashed crutch or
his cassock, or an amalgam of the whole damned lot. As to any kind of
uplift in his face, it blisters with anger and the familiar shoulder-chip
(God don't I know that chip-my thes three sons have born/st like a
crossy ever since I started tpreating them like princest). Well, what
do you expect? Any kind of religian that throws a protective halo round
Sister Mahatma's murderous thoughts must be wrong! To think-a woman
gives up per life to hatred! And what does she get in return? Peace
and security and never a money-worry! And people like me keep her
going. As I said once to Josh when he was blowing his top off about
corruption in high places, And who foots your RAEE bill? It's no
good shouting about the people who happen to finance the voice you shout
with! And the same with the mumbo-jumbo down at the convent-you hear
them at it when you pass in the mornings, all that Latin rigmarole: who
wkopay
foots the bill for
that? And "/naive no right to our say sometimes?
When I feel like this I stride out of the house with my stick under my
arm and for two pins I'd knock the first passer-by on the head with it,
though of course the feeling passes almost as soon as it comese As for
Sister Mahatma, why 'sister'? WHORE! Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure
as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny!
And, to my horror I began blaming Christ while on either side of me
these lovely brides of his are murmuring his praises! I blame him for
building a Church that collapsed in schism and persecution before it had
achieved a religion! I remember someone sajing that sort of thing oncee
Of course I realise that the Church had little to do with him, that the
body temporal is different from the body spiritual. But I needed a
pretext for my resentment! So I drove the spear deeper in his sidel
I said to myself that his religion had falsely objectified the world-
I had heard this said somewhere too: it had built what we see and hear


te'real'world is
and touch into an eternal and stable reality, whereas E /simply
the cauldron of our desirest
These words crowd into my brain without my understanding
them--they aren't my own-perhaps they were a lecture-in California
or somewhere- man--but the words sound convincing enough to make me
feel that my present crime is being committed for good ends-so more


sisters
and more I try to keep the#/out of the chapel, and above all from
silent meditation in their own cells. I want no lovemaking-in-solitude
with the Divine Husband! Imagine my statel I am jealous of his invisible
touches, his inaudible whispers! I begin to look for a cettain excitement
in their eyes when they slip away to their cellsi I pushed open the door
of a cell-it was Brigitte's-to see her astonished face look up from
a breviary. She smiled, in silence. I mist have looked like a bull,
mouth open, sweat on my upper aip. I gave the doorsuch a push that the
whole wing echoed! I made some foolish remark add backed out again.
I manage to speak to her a little when she returns in the evening.
She is out of the house soon after dawnShe pespps into my room just as I
am waking and nods good bye. Her telegrams are negaected, her approach-
ing guests (always a multitude) kept in suspense. But Bood Lord, I've
known Sophia years enough to understand the patbern! She veers so easily
from heaven to hell and back again!
saVs
ust
Over dinner in the evening she talks huskily, and keeps glancing out at
the olive grove, beyond which lies the hospital. I - can almost touch
those nuns, almost tell their namese Her silences have always been Ea
vast mysterious encyclopedias. But I can see the explosion coming
soon. I may be able to cushion the blow, = HIERE as in the case
of the Madison Avenue hairdresser (I made sure to become her friend,
so that she would slip out of the house quietly, without/ritual shipdown).
I watch for her return anxiously
isne du e yat
in the evening. With relief I notice that the showdown
But there is pain in her eyes, this soon, and that telltale frown
that makes her face like a faun's. I unwillingly look forward to long
will
evenings in the future, when shelno longer goes near the convent, and
marvellously orchestrated descriptions will pour out of her-someone will
be to blame for the debacle, and un consciously she will stoke me up with


whisky every few minutes. She will stride round, slap her thighs.
The pain will dig a deep crease between her eyes. I look forward to
it with excitement, because I shall be the sole audiencel Sweetest
Lesbia, let us live and love, and, though the sager sort our deeds reprove,
let us not weigh them! There are no 'deeds' any more but it is all the
more exciting for that."
Brigitte, despite her peaceful smile when she looked up from her
breviary, went straight to Mother Superior and told her how I had burst
which
me a
into
gave
her cell. Mother Superior spoke to me quietly about it,
lovely sense of being one of themrfor being reproved. I said I had
mistaken the cell. She said that the cells were not in the province of
my business, that even she-perhaps especially she-respected them-
'each as a separate temple'. Who had I been looking for? (Did I see a
hint of jealousy in her eye when she asked this?) My genius (good or evil,
I can never make up my mind) sprang to my protection and I said, For you,
Mother Superior! I almost added, Love in my bosom like a bee doth suck
his sweet, but Brigitte came inl I flung out of the roome
Apparently some youths with black cycling helmets tried to stop
acar yesterday evening. They came from the mainland. I hope this
isn't symptomatic. So far we've been free of this sort of thing.
I worked myself to the bone all my life, mostly for other people, I went
crashes
through one or two minor erises of the kind that don't get into the finan-
cial columns, swr and having passed all peril I bought a
plot of land on this island where I saw fresh shadows fit to shroud from
sunny rays fair lawns to take the sun in season due, sweet springs in
which a thousand nymphs did play, soft rumbling brooks that gentle slumber
drew (the springs and brooks by permission of a well-digging firm on the
mainland). The driver didn't stop. He put his foot down. He felt a
thud on the side of the cars it seemed to him that one of the kids fell.
He made a report to the police when he got back but they said they


couldn't do anything about it as it was past their bedtime. All this
increases my tensione The black-helmetted youths melt in with the black
brows of Sister Mahatma to make for my nights a composite picture of helle
I em thinking of putting in for a revolver licence. I've never owned a
dog in my life but now I'm thinking of investing in a couple of the most
irritable bloochounds I can lay my hands one Sister Mahatma would hardly
be a match for them, even with a scimitar between her teethe And Sister
Mahatma has elso become identified in my mind with that girl who kicked
open the door of my room et that Manhattan hotal. I think I need another
business flight, to pluck the keen tooth from this fierce tiger'd jaws,
but I've only been back ten days from the last onea
The Renegade's quotation here is from Spenser's The Happy Islee
His son Josh sees him as a money-making egotist with no imaginative life
at all but he knows by heart some of the tenderedt and most fairywtale
lines in the English language. I doubt if Josh has even read theme
Of course the Renegade gives them the raspberry to save his facs-
"by permission of a well-digging firm'. A peculiar mans He is the
soul of complacency, yet no one could call him complacent in the suff-
ering he obstinately and successfully hides, and the punctilious attention
he gives to all his mistaken conclusionse His rationalism is 80 obviously
a necessary crutche Indeed, the Mother Superior even describes ration-
alism as neurosist It seems to hit the Renegade perfectly. His
quotations are rarely biblical like Aaron's, because he likes the feeling
of tradition and caremony that past literature gives pn. He
Inoushis Shakespeare too-ito pluck the keen teeth ete' is from the
edghth sonnets But Aaron's quotations infect those round himemhis


wife, Sophia--because The Song of Solomon, the Proverbs and the Psalms
are like that. The. - Renegade has no desire to infact. He is acutely
alone.
To my added horror, I see that my resentment of the man on the cross
is working its soft effect on the nunse I say 'to my horror but it was
the fact that this fact did not cause me horror that made me feel the
horrori I am beginning to enjoy it, in a flagrantly destructive way.
I'm behaving like a scorpio, because this is self-destruction in the end
of course, as all destruction is. The appeal for me in all this is that
I am alientting not one delectable wife from her Husband but about a couple
of dozent I found the Mother Superior gazing at me, quite still, from
the other side of the dark and musty chapel yesterday, simply studying me
with a rather wistful expression. My ego-infatuation caressed me into
believing that those eyes of hers were flashing love at mel But the
moment she had gone I knew that she was taking sad stock of me. Yet
even to her my ferment brings good (I have often been called a fermenter).
She knows the geese from the hens now. Brigitte is all fire, unanswerable.
Through me she has been revealed to the Mother Superior. The other brides
will show themselves tool And her own nature will be revealed to heres
who knows? Only Sister Mahatma is quite unknown to me yet. She has
that alluring ivory pallor of the Arab womang glimpsed behind the folds of
a veil lifted by the wind! Her nose is strong like a scimitar! Her


ate
eyes, black spent torchesy put out by the desert sun, - hooded in a
dreams She only looks in front of her. She walks in a gliding way,
with hardly a sway of her habit. Her back is erect. She never talks
at table. Her prayers are so long and concentrated that no one thinks
to go near her during them. She floats, something is bearing her along
all the time, invisible oarse Oh these lovely brides are giving me so
much carel I think of them one by one at night just before sleep.
I have become another Mother Superior, looking after their dreams and
Mc otker
flagellated hopes, while she-the real/
1 the unreal onel-
Sfaming
sees to the grey routine. Was this why she gave me that long wistful
look? But I love my charges! At night I send them kisses across the
island's silence, thirty-two of them, which is their number, excepting
Mother Superior. Sleep, pretty wantons, do not crys and I will sing a
lullabyl
It was a hot morning in early July when I asked this strangely
influential lady from up the hill to come to my front office behind the
west wing. I had heard a great deal about her from the banking gentle-
man's son Josh, when he was in the mainland hospital for rehabilitation
after drug-addiction. He told me about her close association with the
no longer saw each otkar.
Jewish gentleman and his wife, and how they badn
at least
I thought she would/cnow them well, and I might be able to
help Matron in this matter of the wrong pills on the Jewish gentleman's
table. We actually call him professor, as none of us can manage his
Latvian name. Since that Bha moment when she strode, an extraordinary
apparition, into my room we# have had many pleasant hours together,
First we sat in what I call my front office, then I took her 'behind'.
It seemed, to me and I think to all the others, the most natural thing
to do. We felt we had always known her, she had always been with us.
She even seemed to know where we kept things-cups and talcum powder


end-ilothas for needy people. She is all alive with help! It pours
woman
out of her. She wants to know what can we do for that poor a reature
and
down the hill whose husband has just died? /could we not start a sort
Miss Sophia's
of rest-home at Ber expense for drug-addicts(of whom she seems to know
so many? She is always jumping up to help someone into a chair, or ro
carry a gray, or move the refectory tables. Those massive shoulders!
We are all excited like children. She mireculously caught Sister
Esmeralda in her arms the other day when she fell off a ladder, and
Sister Esmeralde is all of aleven stone. I talked to her about the
fathers of the Theban desert. I said that ecstasy must form the basis
of all religions, that it represents the birth of faith, and that those
first Christians of the Nile were the founders of the Church more deeply
than St Peter or St Paul. Thousands flocked to St Antony in the desert
from Alexandria, just because of his ecstasies, which he could hardly have
sharofath others! News of him spread to Rome. Yes, they went to see
the bliss on his facel Clearly a religion that could bring that look
into a man's eyes was worth something! I said that it was the most
fatal thing that could have befallen Christianity after the time of
St Augustine that it should have witheld its treasures of bliss until
after life (fervent nods from Miss Sophia), and give way to the barbarian
temperament by offering heaven to lull the primitive thirst for reward,
and hell for revenge. I think my unorthodoxy surprised her. But
this is always my method with people from outside. Yes, I said, a religion
must fail sooner or later to hold the masses when it withdraws its
living treasures! For heaven and hell, I said, are here and now.
I said what endless benefits came from right religion, and what
horrors sprang from wrong religion. I said all this with a meaning.
I wanted to move her, so to speak, further inside that ray of light from
which none of us is berped. Her face is tortured sometimes. There
are a thousand little histories of calamity written there. She is never


tidden
still. She has
unbelievable storms. I imagine she takes care
never to be abone. Her fears struggle with her pride. She needs the
pride (in her own physical strength, among other things) to stop the
calamities pulling down the tower of virtue. She could be very bad, I
imagine, when particularly blinded by appetite. But she pays each time
the heavy debts show so much in her face, and even in the slightly hunched
way she has of striding along--because this is always the case with
people of special destiny! They are no better than others, and may be
worse, but they pay retribution spectacularly for everything they do.
This is how they learn, and how their destiny remains intact. The most
who de nt pay
terrible lives are those of people who do not pay at all, or rether/at
oncep and lay up a store of unanswered crimen The wicked do not pay
'afterwards'. Those Job lamentations always annoyed me. The payment
is here and now, however much it may be deferred. The murderer pays with
the deed itself, which never leaves him. The dark thought pays with its
dariness. The envious action pays with its gnawing worm of envy. The
possessive pay by being possessed! From the smallest wrong desire an
Down to
echo comes back. L E the tiniest phykicl detailf the body always pays
saw
for its greed. I
this in the hospital.
gave
The VD wing gues
graphic examples. The very wicked have a long deferment, but when they
pay they pay cataclysmically. The good receive an immediate reaction
to any wrong desire, which is gone in a moment, and is ahadowy in sub-
stance.
listened
hip.
Sophia
to me biting her lip, nodding and frowning.
She told me about her many journsys--from Zagreb to Long island-
sleeping on cabin floors--singing for her supper--being fêted like a
queen. She sings for us. Her tenor voice echoes across my little
garden. It makes me think, I don't know why, of Lady Hester Stanhope
and her walled Damascus garden, and those Muslim girls of hers who waited
for ber to get drunk so that they could steal her things. I mean there


is some similar brave, eccentrically colourful self-assertion, a common
vein of aristocracy between the two. I can imagine Sophia fuming over
Lord Palmerston's refusal to pay her the rightful allowance. There are
memories of great drawing rooms in Sophia, too. Not that she ever speaks
of such a thing.
I spent half a day and all night trembling-my teety actually
chattering! I can't believe itl Sister Esmerlada actually pinched my
bottom! I am immediately flung into torments of delight! So this is
how they live together! Can it be possible? Am I being admitted to a
kind of cathedral harem? They have bodies-then surely they need the
signs of love, like the rest of us? They feed their bodies, they sleep-
why should they deny their bodies in other respects? Of course, of
coursel Those cells! That retirement to cellst The way they have
of standing close together! The ease with which they take each otherls
hands, with which they kiss mel And the quality of those kisses! You
can give me all the unenclosed kisses you like, the enclosed ones are the
richest my lips knowl And I took it all for something child-like!
And suppose it is child-like? Children are demons of desirel Their
bacchanalia are secret, more voluptuous by far than their later exper-
iences, because the flowers of their glands are just opening! Yes,
I have uncovered a voluptuary chamber, the roof of gold, the floor of
amberl Is this what Mother Superior means by ecstasy? Is this why
the ecstasyf shines in their eyes from time to time? What exquisite
dartiness there is in the refectory, in the incense-musty corridors, the
untidy chapell How their habits whisper and croon together expectantly
on their way to Aprayers! How a whisper carries (and a kiss?)! She
has full lips, cheeks as round and red and saucy as apples, and she
laughs-and then, while I am standing in the refectory with Sister
Olive, she sweeps with her broom and, quickly, in a second of time,
a à small gesture unseen and unheard that changes my life-she pinches


mel I began so to speak to retaliate-on all of them! My hand went
riot that day! I patted Teresa on the cheek. I tickled Brigitte-
she ran away with a look of even greater alarm than the one she gave me in
her cell, the simulating minx! But what beautiful simulation they all
practicel It #is really brought to the finest pitch of art! And Mother
Superior on top, with her Aythrillingly heretical hymns to Hans Denck
'the Anabaptist pope' and so forth! I see it all, I see it all, oh with
relief and abandon I see it all! They are dancing for Christ, they are
revellers in eternity! Whoever claimed that Loud revellers were necess-
arily the happy ones? No, these are quiet and hidden, they are withdrawn
secret and hushed, to the bridal chamber! Tamorrow and the next day and
the day after that I shall be among them like the owner of doves, and they
shall settle in my hands! Yes, I can construe the action of their
familiar style! I shall be among them like a phundred snakes! I am
giddy, revished, ecstaticlly horrified! And Esmeralda! The appetite of
her eye did seem to scorch me up like a burning glass! But I refuse to
look back at her. She has been the instrument of my discovery but this
is where it must ends I feel distaste at using quean's language but I
can only bear straight tradel It is simulating Brigitte, retiring Olive,
hymning Mother Superior who lure me, not finger-happy Sappho herselfi
Yet I die for another pinch in the backside! Pinch me from behind while
I feast my eyes on Maria, Teresa, Mahatma--make me black and blue
but spare me a confoontation! This is the period of my ambition! Oh
this blessed hour!
I saw it by the look of his eyes when I cam/in his room to draw the
shutters against the noon-day sune He knew who put the dog-pills there.
I left him at once. And this evening, apropos of nothing, he said,
The tender and delicate woman among you, which would not adventure to
set the sole of her foot upon the ground for delicateness and tenderness,
her eye shall be evil toward the husband of her bosom. I was just putting


a glass of lemon tea down. I nearly dropped it. I must say that
after all these years the Biblical quotation unnerves me! If he recited
it like an actor I wouldn't mind but he speaks it with fire and truth.
A sudden ofd resolution came to mes I would study mathematics. A
stirring lightness fillet me. As Novalis said, The life of the gods is
mathematics! I shall have to go to the mainland and buy up a whole lot
of books. Of course he will lolak at them with that serene gaze of his
and murmur, Another path? another lifesaver? He must always have known
that those nursing sisters weren't to blame. He watched their backsides
night and day, afler all.
I walked up the hill to visit the old bugger uninvited, clutching my
silver-knobbed case just because I know it gives him the creepso She let
me in, unusually affectionate in her manner as if his period in hespital had
liberated her from something (from him, I should think!). He gave me the
usual twice-over with his eyes and quickly nodded/towards a chair (he is
sitting up) without saying a word. I remember my last visit, when all
I wanted was to hear news of Sophia. Now that seems a nightmare.
One thing I am grateful for-the variety of life, the fact that you
can have your head in a hood of despair this morning and feel as light
as a baby in the afternoon. He looks OK. I said how glad I was to
see him fit again--which statement he seemed to doubt, as he sniffed
and said nothing. ftually I felt so gay I nearly
R said, Well how are we after the dog-pill cure? I wonder if she had
a bit on the side while he was in hospital. I wouldn't put it past
any of these people. Look how long that ménage a trois,as the Irish
say, lasted. What a magnificent head he has! I brought the subject
round to dogs, via his bitch Silvia, and he gave me a scowl, which
of PILLS!
showed we were home and dry on the desired subject I said I imagined
he would never go to that hospital again. He said, Oh I might.


I suppose he was just being funny. I thought it was my turn for a
sniff, and did so. All of a sudden I realised yhe didn't know a thing
about the Sister Mahatma rumours I began to try to explain. I asked
him which of the sisters nursed him. I even asked him to name them.
None of them was Mahatma. I tried to get him on to Middle East politics,
round to her that way. But it didn't work. He seems really dumb.
I began to want to get away. Who was I to help such a man? I suppose
he's still too ill to go too deep in the matter. On my way to the front
door I gave her an almosy congratulatory smile. Yet I feel sorry for
him---blinded as he is twofold.
Sister Brigitte complained to me for the second time about Miss
Sophia. What was this 'wild creature', she asked, doing behind the
enclosure? I asked her wasn't an effort to 'save' due from us, when
the saving was so easys and the supplicant so much in need? She said
she had an altogether different impression of Miss Sophia, and wished
that at least she would keep her hands to herself. I ought to take
heed. Sister Brigitte, like Sister Mahatma, only opens her mouth to
speak truth. I am troubled, and begin to realise-what seemed to be
dormant for many years-the old weakness-is alive still.
The result of my feeling troubled was that I asked Miss Sophia
to come in and see me even more often. Thus I shall 'sweat it out'
of myself. It is what the Buddhists call 'mastery by giving way'.
We talk quietly, as always. She leans forward, her elbows on her knees,
sometimes cupping her chin in her hand, sometimes poised, staring down,
like a great dark animal-I almost said 'my Caliban'! She doesn't
actually Hgisten to my words so much as tune into the sound of my voice,
to its conviction or stress. She makes everything a performance.
This is her approach to everything. My talking becomes a speech.
Nothing voulu, I mean, but what I say becomes beuatifully rounded and


measured as if she were conducting it. I discover how deeply I have
come to need her. We all need to be saved! Did Sister Brigitte's eyes
say this to me, as she left the room?
I began talking about the Germany of my youth. It was good for me
to go back over the years. I said that a neurotic strain ran through the
whole generation born in Germany at the beginning of this century. What
was I saying? I suddenly remembered the words on John Gay's tombstone-
Life is a jest, and all things show it, I thought so once, and now I know
itl Yes, I went on, there was something uneven and unhinged in us all.
kad
Zfelt it deeply in Munich. Those Nazi rallies of 1929 and 1930 seemed to
poiny it up. I told her about the wildness of Berlin at that time, how
one
it reminded/ of Gozzi's remark about Venice in its decline--the men were
eys!
women, andthe women men, and both were monki There was the well-nigh
ecstatic inflation, when a bar of soap cost millions of marks, and a group
of Berlin children became rich men, with a car of their own,when they found
a crate of soap in perfect conditan in a disused warehouse. Ecstatic'
because wa all sort of enjoyed it, those of us who managed to get food!
You didn't have to be responsible about anything. And I remembered the
youth movement-we wanted to escape the heavy rationalism of the nineteenth
century and get out into the woods, and learn to be bodies again, not
ideas any morel Rationalism, I told her, is a token of deep uncertainty
and loss of self-control. Its craving for order comes from acute personal
Grermans Raal
stress! I talked on urgently, my face close to hers. Therefore we ware h
been
Rad
all)the natural patients of Freud! Wejworahipped him, I mean people like
me, because the neurotic was his invention-we felt identified all pof a
sudden! None of Freud's callow analysis works, I said, unless you
believe in him. He had what he called his 'empire' of followers, mostly
in Vienna, but bis real empire stretched across the western world, in
every middle class homel He created us, I said, he brought our troubles


to light. His thought was a last attenpt to get things straight
rationally. And it didn't work! We j all the children, I said,
of what we used to call the Grunderjahre after the fatal victory over
France in 1870. Miss Sophia stared at me with almost frightened eyes.
Rad been
How much was she understanding? There/B too much money in Germany, I
said, after that victory, and too little spirit! We had become the shallow
inheritors of a stupendous culture-look what we had achieved-the
thought and the science- the poetsl, the operas, the music! Nothing,
it seemed, was too big for us, everything had to be on big terms, we
felt ourselves to be the deepest people on the earth, our language the
most receptive, by its very sounds and combinations, of deep thoughts!
Wagner's music had to be all music, it had to fill the whole universel
Nietsche's thought the samel I grew up with my head full of vague,
universal statements, too intellectual, because not closely enough conn-
ected with my own life, as I lived it. And, like so many others of my
age, I reacted against that, into a kind of clipped and careful and
basically sceptical rationalism which put a veneer over the real state
intide.
of uncretainty and ardent impulsiveness/ If there is a German weakness,
I said, and a German strength, it is over-impressionapility. The over
pursuit of the rational has fearful dangers for people who practice it
irrationally! For the rational, I said, is always in terrible marriage
with the irrationall The two/togethar-may I say in the same patient?
Look at the immense crescendo of violence in the last century, correspond-
ing precisely with the crescendo of rationalism! We Germans produced
Einstein on Athe one hand and Wolfgang Griser, the young writer who
made phrases like "body sense' and 'organic intuition' famous among
Kave
us, on the other. 1/even come to the conclusion that the higher the
Sxplosion aglinwant!
rationalist thought, the more terrifying the)eum EEILME tax Look at
Einstein himself. He carefully weighed up the possibility that the
physicists he had left behind in Germany were developing the atom bomb-


I mean in the last war, I said, when he was living in the United States-
andjwent to the president and encouraged him to develop the Bomb before the
Germans dide And then, when the Bomb was developed and ready to drop,
he went to that president's successor and pleaded with him to stop manu-
facture! mhongh--ChAz 15 a E1E
BLA
Here you see the
uncertainty, that lack of clear objectives which first provokes the
rationalist career, and then undoes it.
I was
sweating. All these years I had lived so cloistered,
had addressed not more than a brief sentence or two to anyonel had foll-
tem
owed my precious routines and through that been a pillar of support for
many, especially in recent years at the mainland hospital, Before I moved
the
here, when I was charge of rehabilitatingJdrug casese I had for some-
thing like thirty years, oh more, chosen the words I spoke, and thought
them out before hand! But here I was gushing helf-conceipved thoughts
like a young girl, just as I had done in my last year at school, and
later in the Munich period! It showed how much I had simply interrupted
my true life, instead of developing it to what should now be the final
orgchestration. Was Miss Sophia an instrument for showing me this?
She had broken on me like a storm, and I had found that I still had
panic in me, that after all terror had not been excised from my system,
not other things- gecstasies of a kind I would not have admitted to even
a month, a week agol
Miss Sophia said briefly, with a slight cough, as if waking from a
trance, Yes, Einstein has always interested me, I followed his argument
with Werner Heisenberg, the author of the Principle of Indeterminacy,
and one of his best pupils. My mouth fell open! Where did those
words come from? It couldn't be from her mouth! But there she was,
Yes, Iraid,
sitting before me, reassuringly quiet. I laughed. k There you have hhe


principle of uncertainty itselfy in one of Einstein's followers!
Isuid,
Finally everything is uncertain in the universe,) when confronted by pure
reason- which in the end means pure unreason! Einstein never wanted to
admit this, I said, he quarrelled with your Wwerner Heisenburg about it-
but nevertheless it was the result of his own reltivityl Yes, Miss Sophia
said, jumping up in her excitement, I have had these same thoughts, I'm
sure I havel Yes, I said, we are moving towards the same objestive!
She took me by bth# hands, squeezed them with the strength
two ment
off
She drew very close to me, I could smell her lavender breath! So my
random thoughts were worth itl We stood breathing close together!
I could feel the curves of her body under her loose blouse, which billowed
round her waist, while she stood astride in her leather boots and Russian
trousers. She was much too excited, and I drew her gently to her chair
again. I walked to the other side of the room, where the french windows
out
were, and lookedh breathing deeply. I thought it better not to talk for
a little. When we live a little unnaturally, for a long time, a storm
gathers itself up in the sky in the distance, and approaches slowly, and
our
may take half a lifetime to break over amts head. The longer the
and there
deferment, the greater the storms I could have fainted theraand then,
I knew that in some way it was the end of the convent for me, After
how many years of serene devotion-helf a century, more even?
Suddenly she asked me, in that quietly pained way she sometimes has,
What is a neurotic? am I one? She looked at me as if she were a visitor
on the earth and would be gone again in a moment. I suppose, I said,
a neurotic is someone who never leaves the level of the personal self.
And that could hardly be true of you. In a certain way it is, she said,
but only because somehow being personal, being myself is being-well,
something to do with not being personal-you see what I mean?-some-
thing supernaturel- don't want to blaspheme and say Gody. I smiled.
Is it blaspheming to say God? I asked her. We are all torn into the


Isaid.
divine, into the genuine self, In deep sleep we are without that
personal self, but we have not ceased to exist. Only our minds are not
active. Phare-may-mteventm-thE-TEmE Now the neurotic is concentrated
on the immediate waking self to an obsessive degree. And to this degree
he is the opposite of the religious mane I noticed it so much when I
was working on the mainland. If you argued with the neurotic type, if
could
you let yourself show indignation, he i only hear the tone of your voice,f
persona
see your menacing gestures, and translate your vehemence into aff/ attack,
The
neurotic sees the world as neurotic. Since little that he sees or hears
has real content apart from his personal self, so he sees all bthers as
personal
prisoners labouring under various forms off distress. When I was young
it became quite a fashion to challenge all forms of vehemence, indeed
sincerity too, as of a nervous origin. It helped, you see, towards the
coming emptiness, when no one believed in anything any more, when history
died.
I was looking at her closely.
suddenly
It teatly seemedto me
that we had become as close as sisters. I
was talking calmly. Yet I seemed to be speaking thoughts common to us
both, quite as if she were talking as well, and me listening. Obviously,
even
success and display and brutality weigh a great deal with
the neurotic, I went on, almost touching her hand. You see, the neurotic
is in awe of any certainty. This more than anything accounted for the
when! was youg.
success of the Nazis) No one really took them seriously, but they were
certain of themselves. No one could seriously believe, before 1932,
that a bunch of heartless ruffians could get to the) tops
you know
Copeuleina
licu a
that the president of Germany, General Hindenberg, bankern the idea
of making Hitler his chancellor) grotesque and unthinkable until an hour
before he actually did it? Especially the young fell for the Nazis, not
because they believed their nonsensical ideas, or because they thought
that Germany was in the grip of a Jewish conspiracy, but because


the Nazis were implacable in what they said! Their strokes were bold
and direct. Business-men inside and outside Germany did the rest.
No foreign government withdrew its embassy when it saw a trouble-making
gang in charge of Berlin. Francois Pancet, the French ambassador there,
iinlemalion a
even hoped for some kind of/big-business deal with the Nazis - against
the trade unions. The communists went on voting against the social
democrats, and dividing the anti-Nazi majority. They even voted with
the Nazi party in the Riechstag on one occasion. Everyone needed Hitler
for something, you seel The ordinary people only consolidated what was
already an acknowledged success. Even the Holy Father did and said
too.
nothing! So what opposition there was among us dwindled away/ And
then Hitler mentioned Christ respectfully now and then. You see where
obsessive rationalism led people? Into the flames of irrationalisml
For the over-development of the mind simply meant the under-development
of the spirit. In a struggle between the mind and the animal, the
becau
animal EB obviously going to win, IFEX
the mind has turned it
bease
into a neglected and therefore furious m mal
Grerman
So the/doctors and lawyers and professors who thought that the mind
rosay
and science and analysis had the last ward] Jabout life suddenly found them-
actually votiis for
selves with their backs to the wall, and in many cases tmmmttt TEMSEIVES
smparcting a political group they knew to be a bunch of hooligans with
not one serious political idea to their credit! Armies of the dark-
suited respectable merched tamely into the concentration camps or the
Nazi army! All Hitler had to do was E shout a little harder, and
promise more brutality. I think the neglected animal in all those
little rationalists warmed to the sound of a new barbarism. So many
of them (as I know from my own home life) were brutes at home, and
quiet-spoken rationalists outside. Perhaps the brute had to come out
into the open in time!


Few people lack all vestige of Nazi colouring, I told her. An
awe of success (so deeply German, at least when I was young) was already
a step towards its All the Nazis had to do was imitate the outward steps
necessary for successi Their political message was almost irrelevant.
It had to be simple. It needn't be true. If you told a lie you simply
repeated it, and in the end all those armies of rationalists, not only
in Germany but the rest of the world, believed it. How many, inside or
outside Germany, believed in the concentration camps until the day they
were opened? For them the truth was a matter not of direct apprehension,
it was not a blinding light, a dawning revelation, but observation! It
failed them completelyl
She seemed to be thinking something out. I was sure that the problem
of the neurotic was still in her mind. She leaned forward, elbows on her
knees. I believe there is a haunting conviction in her that she is biom
logically twisted, and could be untwisted. I dare say a lot of Freudian
propaganda has come her ways digging and delving into the Unconscious will
straighten out her twisted desires! But how absurd to think that by render-
ing the past rational you exorcise its nightmares! Hopeless to duck your
head in the space-time cosmology and say, This is my home, this is where I
stay! The nerves fall to pieces that way, you create violent animal
passions all round you, not to say madness, sorrow, self-destruction,
rebellion in the young! All the time wondering how it came about, while
you were so sensible and sober and fact-finding and cooll No use analysing
past events, because past events are simply thoughts. They are our thoughts.
And simply regurgitating thoughts cannot help us to escape them. Wef
can be rendered cold to them, yes, by making them public. There is a
certain remedial technique here. We can be shown the degree to which our
role determined a given distressing situation, rather than vice versa.
Some poor and careful freedom could result, ducking inside the space-time


cosmology, clinging to its illusions for dear life. But only cepasing
to identify ourselves with our thoughts, with thoughts altogether, can
achieve the real liberation. You have to find out who you are, and
begin to see that your desires are not genuinely yours, and your achieve-
ments not genuinely yours, but are played out on a kind of stage, whose
scenes you have chosen, and continue to choose, in the quaint and exhil-
arating role of being both protagonist and spectator. You have to know
that you own nothing, and in that are everything. We already have all
we need. (I wish I could say I had learned thisl) (1)
I didn't say this to Miss Sophia. I thought it would be 'taking her
too far' just yet.
And, after all, she is about three decades
(1) Despite my promise that the Mother Superior would here talk about
the Freudian unconscious, I find that she does so in other narratives,
not published here. I tried to insert them above, but naturally they
stuck out like a sore thumb. Her claim, if I understand it right, is
that we have no 'static pool of images' inside us, into which we take a dip
now and then, for a memory or impulse. We experience and we memorise,
she says, in A manufacturing way. It is rather like doing exercises.
The experience is a first exercise which the muscles absorb (though they
do not store anything). When the exercise is 'repeated' the memory of the
experience arises, being already in the muscles, their incipient strength.
Now the muscles act towards a definite end. In the same way experience and
memory are towards definite ends, but these are not rational, much less
irrational. They are simply not thoughts at all. Thus we cannot solve
our problems by turning everything experienced into thoughts. We increase
the problem that way. "Thought cannot control the animal', she says.
Thus she sees the Freudian system as a desperate attempt to salvage rational-
ism, while completely undermining it-rather as she sees the Einsteinian
and Kantian systems. M.R.


younger than myself. She cannot have sat thinking in solitude quite
so many hours-days--weeks-as myself.
She lefvaimost at once, thoughtful, with those immense shoulders
slightly hunched as always when she is under some distress. I was happy
she was out of the room-out ofthe convent, with her strong aurora.
I walked into the garden, breathing freely again. I remembered her lavender
breath, the strong iron touch of her hands, (but an iron that had just
been manufactured at the hot centre of the eartri Oh who am I to save?
At this moment I need saving more desperately than anyone behind this
enclosurel I remember what a long and tough road I had to travel, for
twenty years ot mors,to avoid hands like hersl Now I am old and find
that the fires are still not out! I try to tell myself, But these are
only thoughts! Blow them away and return to your inner templef of
silencel I know they will go. I feel so confident of this that I
even indulge them. I sat down and enjoyed those hands again in the
silence of my room, I drew myself closer to them and-then the image
disappered. Difficult to sin at seventy-threel
I was dozing in my chair when I heard the car drive up and saw
Miranda flit by with two huge parcels in her armse She went straight
to my wife's room. In the afternoon when the house was empty again
I shuffled along to see what they were. By that time the wrapping paper
Uonst
had been taken off, and about two dozen books on mathematics-by no
ejaw smplebuclid
means simply textbooks either-stood side by side on my wife's table.
What am I to expectfrom this? I would put it down to menopause except
that she seems to have had an annual menopause for the last fifteen years.
In the old days her desperate search for a function in life went on side
by side with my work. It seemed natural and commendable. Now it
always feels like a pistol lvelled at my head. That was Sophia's work.
Since that woman set foot in my house I have been all things to my wife-


from harmless brother to wise uncle-but not the essential thing,
not the husband I was before. People find it hard to understand my
venom towards Sophia (I am naming her fully again!) but only I know what
she can do. Step into a household and put the kiss of death an the
quick and tender and warm, and that isn't done with talk or even action!
Something silent and powerful is at work, a fearful radiation that withers
anything unsuspecting in its pathe I only realise now why I prayed so
much in those New York days, swaying from side to side. I used to love
those Sabbath gatherings in the Bronx, with an amy army of relatives,
an the seven-branched candelabra on the table, E the women sitting
round the wall, while we men swayed from side to side E our arms
round each other's shoulders and gradually began dancing as the chant
became more and more ecstatic! I survived, yes! To whom Aoan God
be deniedf, when God is called to? But this woman here in my house,
on whom I once hung necklaces and spangles, in what sense did she survive?
Kov
4 wl IPAMIERIRA 1 BAUISE It will be infinity and
Pythagorean numbers and harmonics and whathot for the next six months,
until she finds that the coolwlooking symbols y order and symmetry lead
her even further into the hot darkness she is trying to escape. And
I have to be a witness of all this, and must seem not to know. The
godless irritate me.
I all but fell out of the Mother Superior's roome I Earsea dashed
back to the house
unconscious of every-
thing round me until I reached my room with its massive mirror, and
there I couldn't remember having left the convent, much less walked
up the hill! The mirror was the last thing I wanted to see, with its
hated reflection! I forced myself to gaze at it, at the gorilla shoulders,
the mastiff jaw, the snakey Medusa headl How could I so much as put
a foot inside that consecrated hall of female virtue? Hadn't she as


good as told me I was sick and forlorn, with just about every mental
disorder named by that arch-devil, arch-saviour Freud? Everything from
tertiary
schizophrenia to *ripte paranoiaf How often I have stormed up and down
the room with Cassandra as my sole wondering audience, vituperating,
sometimes screaming abuse at the top of my voice, all because of THE
MALEI The vehement, hour-long spesches were always on account of one
of that race-and a friend, always a friendi And then, perhaps next day, EXS
next minute, I might see him again, and open my eyes to the fact that
here was simply a human being, simply another poor devil, smiling with
slight hesitancy towards me, believing himself to be my friend-yes, a
mere human being with a poor damned limp rod between his legs in a few,
sad, last, gray hairs. Why all that screaming abuse, then? Cassandra
would look at me with awed disbelief. So much theatre, so much banging
of tables and stamping of feet! For little of it was real anger. It
was vehemence of an essentially theatrical order. I meant no harme But
how to avoid the cold accusing gaze of the little Viennese doctor who tells
me that I am nothing but a machine of reactions that can be formulated in
L have n medicine in Hhen,
medical tarmsk Some cure, thati I feel in the most frightful prison-
where can I fly to, away from the misundratpood consequences of my own
actions? Only one creature can help me, and that is the creature who
dashed me down so far this morning, into the chasme Next day I found
myself punctually at the convent.
Naturally, Sophia misunderstood the Mother Superior in precisely
the way she needed to. As we know, the Mother Superior actually
said how little of a neurotic Sophia seemed to her to be. She implied


Yer
that, on the contrary, she found a strong religious vein in Sophia--
'religious' being by definition the opposite of 'neurotic' for the Mother
Superior. She talked about the Germany of her youth, the neurotic awe
of brutality, the Nazi success--and Sophia plunges out of the convent
feeling she has been reduced to nothing! Like so many of the Mother
Superior's patients at the mainland hospital, she was at the stage (nec-
essary for self-examination) of taking everything as a personal attacks
in this she is neurotic.
John
I like her misuse of Keats-the 'limp rod' in its "fen,ead, last,
gray hairs'. Keats was telling the nightingale about what it had never
known--'the weariness, the fever and the fret-here, where men sit and
hear each other groan, where palsy shakes a few, sad, last, gray hairs.
And Yuitt
pele cuck speck ftuii cd dics Yer,t te
Itie sloury
Another rahubied of the secret order in Sophia's life-behind mradnts noisy wester!
theatre. So secret that you would never find a copy of Keats in her
house. I suppose she is close to Keats in many, of her moods. What
about "when the melancholy fit shall fall sudden from heaven like a weep-
ing cloud'? And 'the voice I hear this passing night was heard in ancient
days by emperor and clown"?
Apropos of this 'order' in her life, perhaps we ought to note here
that every one of the people whose narratives we are following is (except
for Miranda, the Aaron maid) of middle-class upbringing as that tuseaves 'used
be-I mean that distinct middle class which, before it was crushed by the
second world wars used to have access to leading positions in society,
was relatively small, and was given a decided form by its schools and
A elass dull o] Sno E a
military colleges and even
con Tvents. Now all these people
are dispersed (socially speaking), and carry about with them their separate
relics of the upbringing. I mention this now because their quotations-
the Renegade's from Spenser and Shakespeare, Sophia's from Keats-have


about them the surprise of a past society suddenly re-enacted. In a
moment we realise that a class structure, long after it has disappeared,
is carried about for years by those who in childhood absorbed it as simply
the way life was. Sophia's 'order as I have called it is, I believe,
of this origing it derives from the safety of a quiet seat-meals being
cooked elsaghero-olean laundry waiting on the bed-in a room with the
nenan Fasks and neigh
Hackhrd lentalire hole
clock ticking and lazy country sounds/outside. I believe that though an
orphan she always had a small army of well-to-do relatives to fall back on
in trouble. There was something restful to the nervous system in that.
Otherwise it takes a lifetime to recover from the nervous shocks of poverty
in childhood. And her quotation is from an English poet. That argues
acquaintance with English from an early age. More than a convent-and
more than an orphanage-provided that.
She came to me looking washed-out and pale under the tan. She
reminded me of a
beargt had once seen one chained up in
ttay whinig Crealir's hed
Prames
Kurdistan, and a manj twisted the skin of ite-neck with a long iron
pole, Just-formomenty just for the fun, and I heard this animal's
tus eye
pleading whimper, and saw ite-face. She almost fell into a chair.
She said she had been through a gauntlet of nightmares: no sleep.
Would I send a priest to bless her house? A pectiliar question. I


her
looked at her and smilede I asked hax did she hope this would exorcise
the devil? She said, Well, I was away over Easter and the priest usually
comes and gives each Aof Te rooms a blessing, It seems to help, she
said. It only helps because you think it helps, I said. Good God, she
said, her head buried in her hands, her shoulders hunched forward, so
dynamically pregnant of action, How can you say that, in your position,
in this place? I told her quietly that blessings and such things were
pleasant actions in themselves, and they were for people who had to rely
on others for spiritual secrets. But you, I added, strike me as self-
reliant. You have to exorcise the devil yourself. And that means
to stop being the devil, stop adopting the rolel Hal That was the
sound she made-half discovery, half disbelief. Because, I said, the
devil is only a role. He doesn't exist. Only God exists. She looked
up and said, Yes, yes! That's why his little eyes are cold and accusing!
He sees the devil in everything! Therefore he is the devill He plays
the role himself!
about
Who are you talkingz Zaskced her from the other side of the roome
She talked half to herself, muffled up in her hands. Oh it doesn't
matter, she saide And then-Tell me something comforting, something
more, go on talking to me. I went closer to her (if she knew how I
absorbed her thrilling radiationsl) and said, still quietly, You see,
see
Miss Sophia, you think yourslee an abandoned person, and g God as
looking at you from outside. Try to think of Him as looking outside
from inside you, and you will have a better picture of what it is all
about.
These
antted devilish' things are only travails of the earth-self,
EEE
the results of living in the world. They can't be refusede They
have to be understood. And RH understanding only comes when you
look inside for the answer. AIMER a T
Don't be ashamed of yourself, because that is a concern for reputation,


ynuself.
where the audience, the accusing audience, is one
hen-mer
Hes
Shame and pride and fear, they
cling together. If you get rid of one, you get rid of all theee. The
first to tackle is fear. You have never been abandoned, you never will
and never could be abfandoned. Believethat blindly at first, then you
will EET
live the truth of it slowly.
I said, If you believe God is outside (which means believing in
the eternal abandonment of the human creature) it is a next step to
blaming Him for suffering. But suffering, I said, is not a negative
force, noft is it a definition of evil.
It's strange, she said, I feel as if I'd heard these words before.
Samewhere along the jet-rorte, some mani She looked up suddenlys
You aren't very orthodox are you? No one religious is, I told her.
That's why the Church broke Anto pieces when the Spaniards tried to
Ieis
were
impose a orthodoxy,
aas In Spain you EREISSSE
suspected of heretical leanings if you cut the fat off your pork, or
failed to eat pork. I don't believe the Church would have tried to
ahot
such a thing, if left to itself, Ttl was a typical politician's moves
The Church's power would have dwindled just the same with the ascent of
rationalism from the sixteenth century onwards, but it would have kept its
tender secrets. Unhappily everything was torn downg long before a religion
had really taken root,
a We began to lose sight of the tremendous
powers latent in aa
- us. We reduced ouraigves to minds. We
put all the power there, until we believed there was no pfower elsewhere.
The way to live was therefore forgotten. The way to change life with-
out activity or calculation was forgotten. People ceased to shine.
Thinking took the place of shining. And you are a marvel,
Iaid-
I suddenly faced her bravelys catching my breath, almost unable to go on
because you still shine, and that's why you stick out, that's why you


feel yourself to be abnormal. You shine not with finished spiritual
ones
powers but with those E latent animal/which can lead to the
l light! Mind hasn't withered you, I said. I almost fainted,
having said this, but thank God she was unaware of the selfecommital on
my side that had led me to say ito
In the end, I said, Len the mind) Jin sole control, you get terrible
nightmares. meycheear mP
Think of those suicide waves in Germany, when I was a young womant Aee
fnose young people mre unable to cope with the nightmarel Unable to
know that we choose suffering and we choose release.
exasi IHIRIRIE
je TRE
stenes Really we Germans plunged into a frightful war
lastes
more than thirty years, after 1914 (I was glad to be on the objective
again!). Because we went further into retionfaliom than anyone else,
we had to go further in irrationalism than anyone else! For these two,
as I said the other day, can never be separated, and the growing precedence
of science since the sixteenth century must mean the growing precedence of
war. The last four centuries have indeed been the story of a growing
totalisation of wars until now society has become virtually a war-machine
witk us as
raRa its spectators, our thoughts and our gleanings of truth and
our adventures now simply private events, without much radiation on the
dark powers outside us, as if we were all somehow on a protracted holiday,
ineffectual in everything we do! More tharany other consideration, I
told her, it was this that drew me to the convent, when I was a POERR
girl. I remember seeing this present world coming, I saw its flames,
physically, in a series of violent daydreams. Remember that this was
German at Hat limis seemed unchallengeabl
even before the first world war, and our)world
safe,
our peace simply the HE way life was!
I realised E clearly that the effective zone of action was going to


cease to be outside, in the world. That way led to nightmare and
the obligation to destroy. An act of the deepest concentration was
incumbent on us, in solitude, in order to bring our dormant powers alive
again without which we could not go on (I mean even as a race). The war
machine in which we live must destroy itself, but it might destroy us.
You cannot fight the devil-that is, men dressed up as the devil-by
ate
action, because action and the world of power ts precisely his fielde
I left her this time feeling-convalescent; not clear, or resolved,
but under treatment. Really I couldn't tell what she had said. I
returned to Cassandra at lunchtime and not at nightfall, and we attacked a
huge three-course banquet between the two of us, with wine and coffee laced
with brandy afterwards. What I did derive from Mother Superior's words
and
was the feeling, Thereis work to do, thntts no more time for ridiculous
private problems which Frugd glorified. His world was smashed to pieces,
so was his race, almost. Too many private problems! No, there is im-
portant work to do-I suddenly saw that private problems were nothing
but vanity!
The moment she left me I rushed to the chapel and almost fell to
my knees. I had talked about concentration-the powers that accrued
from self-restreint, and while I was doing so I absorbed her lavender
breath as if it were the last life-giving breath of all, I almost touched
her great shoulders, pulled her magnetic head towards my stomach as I
was standing therel What have done? I asked this in my prayers.
For years I had rejected those 'give-me' prayers that are really the
degradation of prayer, though accepted now as the Christian way. But
now I did ask for lightl I am seriously disturbed. The garden no
longer seems the same to me. I find myself no longer preoccupied by
the welfare of those in my charge. I failed to visit the refectory
semubbing
to see that the ckeenting had been done and fresh flowers put out. The


mail lies unanswered on my desk.. Forty yearshave slipped from my
shoulders!
I have returned to the giddy roundabout of pleasure and
pain after all these years! There must be a reason. We are guided in
all things. And so I pray and pray for light. I am deeply in love.
I slept: no gauntlet of nightmares for me. But it was a tense,
surface sleep. And some delirious ecstasy is at work. I should be
suspicious of it, because it only has to do with the flesh, that is death,
and not with life. But I hungrilyabsorb sensations from forty years ago.
And how mysterious everything becomest Was I getting stale in my easy
piety, surrounded by these stout mediaeval walls, my holiness guaranteed
by the socially useful hospital attached? Am I being shaken awake?
In my ecstasy my room begins to throb with secretly rapturous life, just
like things were in youth! And the night outside, beyond the french
windows, comes in like a divine dust whispering to me, and the sea all
round the island joins the whisper, and I wish the night to go on and on,
and myself not to fall asleep in case I miss a second of the excitmento
wake
I wakce not tired but voluptuously aware of myself. I have always eaten
carefally, slept early, walked great distances. I am unwithered by my
seventy-five years. My skin is fresh. So-I smiled to think it,
feeling quite collected-the old lost friend vanity has dropped in to
see me again! He was probably only just round the corner all these
years, hoping to renew the acquaintance before I popped off for good!
Yes, old times again! How poor! How unexpected! How lovely! I
looked at myself in the mtrror, nakede What did Lorenzo de' Medici
say in one of his laudi- I die when I look at myself, but talking to
You I never die again! I could fight all this. But something in
me wants to see how far I will go, and where it will lead me.
For two days she didn't come. It meant I could enjoy my delirium
in peace. Feast myself on her memory- -better than having her a few
HeIEL EmERE


feet from me, my eyes afraid to feast themselves on her directly!
I did all my duties. There was a thrilling silence in the corridors,
the gardene The occasional swish of a sister's habit was like a trem-
endous promise-tomorrow would come, I would see her again, I would
feel the lavender breath steal over my facel All the time I am watching
myself with faint disbelieving detachment. But detachment is hardly the
right worde I am being swept along! A smile from her and the detach-
ment is a dead intellectual bone tossed in the windl On the third day
she came, and clearly there had been no nightmares in the interval.
Her skin was clear, her hair breathtakingly black, E sparkling like a
midsummer night sky! And her handsl I admire them so much-the nails
so cared-for, the skin smooth, the fingers capable and unhesitant. And
her stride-I heard it suddenly, echoing down the corridor, and all the
earth began to signgt I had to turn to my desk, bury my head in my
accounts, to hide my delighted smile, my tears of reliefi She sat down
and luckily was so unaware of my state that I had time to collect myself
and train my eyes in a few moments to look at the too-marvellous, the
too-mysterious again! And yet I know all this is death and pain and
unhappiness, that I am pulling down in a few days what it has taken
forty careful and not at all unhappy years to build. Luckily again
she wanted to talk about herself. It was a source of terrible alarm to
her, she said, that she was so different from other people. I laughed.
And other people, I said, spend the greater part of their lives trying to
be precisely that-different! But being different all the time, she
said, is no luxury. In my case, it's a crucifixion. And in what lies
your difference? I asked her, keeping my voice dead level, holding on to
tgr!
my excitement as I had not needed to
forty-oh
years.
Well, you see me as a woman, you call me a woman, but yet-ea she
said, I am also male in my parts, I mean not altogether, it really is


difficult- The combination is strange and terrible, she said-
I suppose all creatures are torn by the wild horses of passion but I
am torn in opposite directions, passion means torture for mel But
passion means torture for everyone, I said. The wild horses always pull
in opposite directions, I said. We looked at each other and I knew
what she could not bring herself to say. The horses dragged her to what
she could not perform! Yes, I could read it everywhere in her facel
Yet she founded her life on being able to perform, she was unable to give
up the pretencel I don't know what it was that made me see this. Perhaps she
Convey
wanted to tell me this truth in silence, and
was able to/e it because
she is of such dynamic quality, she only has to send a strong shaft of
distinoll,
thought towards someone for it to be instant known! Or perhaps I
saw that no woman would have been able to exercise such a spell over me
as 'she' did, and even less a man- -in the most captivating way she was
the promise of both! I suddenly felt a fierce compassion for her-I
wanted to fling my arms found her shoulders--but it was a compassion
that withdrew itself like a coquette, because I want those wild horses to
go on tearing her limbs and giving her a mask of such dynamic agony!
I left Mother Superior feeling strangely remote from myself. She
makes the poor creature that not many minutes before had given Esmeralda
her
a laughing kiss on mtae lips (she had made me a present of a little
breviary) seem ancillary to another me. I am asyonished by Mother
Superior's coolness. She is all God's. She can see everything I
need and everything I am--without the smallest partiality for or
against on her part. I really could be anyone for her-but I mean
this in a special way: anyone and everyone is for her a god. This
is why I took my problems--or really, come, let me face it, I only
have one whale of a problem, of which the others are only the sparkling
little pilot-fishl--and laid then in her lap. I am incapable of


thinking an 'Esperalda' thought when I am with her. I keep my head
lowered, and find it difficult to enter the penetrating shaft of her
gaze which has probably already seen with its terrible inner eye the hot
encounter between Esmeralda and myself-andhas prayed for us both.
I have always loved easy triumphs. And so Esmerlada got a return pinch
in the backside as I walked down the corridor on my way out. I heard
her Proushy rich) laughter echo behind me. No one listens twice to that.
It rings through the convent all day. Not a sign of Sister Mahatma.
I peeped round the corner into the chapel as if to take the holy water
and say a quick standing prayer, but no one was there. I had a sudden
unthinkable thought:
- I had triumphed over him-on the cross,
watching me with his dying eyes at this very moment! This is what I
meant when I told the Mother Superior of/being torn by wild horses!
I hope He forgives mel Yes, I know He understands,
But at once,
following this feeling, comes a rush of hot proud resentment that I of
all people should be asking forgiveness of a mant
When she came home I told her the news, that Sister Mahatma was
apparently behind putting the dog-pills by the profeseor's bed, or at
least so the island's bush-telegraph is saying. Miranda, and also our
own cleaning girl, told me. At once the marvellous creature looked
darks that is, her eyes became black like marbles and a deep crease
appeared between them, making it seem that her ears would develop
points like a faun's. She went utterly quiet. Cassandra, she said,
how can you talk such frightful nonsense? I said it was only what I
had heard. She has Apassed through such secret crises in the last few
days, I quickly regretted having told her. EanT I am still waiting
for the explosion to happen, when she will rush back home and give me
the whole history of her visits to the convent in violent, vividly
staged episodes, her voice rising and falling, echoing down the olive


grove, making the animals alert wth happy excitement-yes, she has an
effect on the animals-birds wake and twitter with elation when she
walks at night, neighbouring dogs (who know her like a sister) come and piss m
Fees
Hay
B when her shout is heard,) waggkag their tails, L cats rub their
our
backs against Harleg I sau,in her sudden black gaze,a special
concern for Sister Mahatma. The injusticabr it kindles a fire-I
can
outa see it smouldering! What a lovely thing it my is to witness
her horror of injusticel And R all the more ripe if a man administered
the injustice. FPI Finding a man somewhere, as the first cause of any
trouble, is never difficult for her. Cherchez 1'homme is her mottol
In this case it is clearly the old Jew. She lowered her head, biting
her lip-pondering tomorrow's action. How I know it! She wants to
rush back to the convent and shower on Sister Mahatma everything from
kisses to nips of whisky! I persuaded her to sit down and have a quiet
bite to eat. We had scampi preceded by avocado pear. I told her what
lo me,
trouble I had taken over the scampi, to transfer some of her compassion/
and in any case this is always a good way of getting her to eat with
concentration because she feels a homage has to be paid, and she grows
quiet and respectful, she seems to be listening to the food as she eats,
with little mms of appreciation, and she takes the food gith a quaint
delicate care, giving me glances almost of awee How can I leave gazing
at this creature! how not feast my eyes night and day on her, trouble
her in sleep! be her shadow in the worldl Oh how I thank God for
existing!
I prayed long after she left me. The convent is quieter these
days, I mean for mee Sister Brigitte seems to have forgotten her
complaints. This is only because the war is now i going on inside
me! I long for her to have problems-to come to me again in agony!
And then, today, my aching hope was satisfied miraculously, double-


satisfied--by the sound of her stride I could hear her feverish
anxietyl And the strides made unhesitatingly for my room! I could
hardly believe my luck-just as if I had prayed in the chapel for this!
And how can I say that what He is doing is wrong, how do I know what the
end will be? My faith is being tested. And I find it remains my
settled conviction that a blessing bestowed is never taken away.
Yes, my life was too deeply blessed to be disrupted in a moment! She
burst into my room, and I almost ran to her in my relief. Her brow seemed
fixed down by a great iron clip between her eyes-she was burning,
tarough
burning! What great rivers of feeling crash /this body of hers!
Sister Mahatma! This was the subject, of all unexpected things! She
could hardly take breath--hardly make herself understood. Sister
Mahatma was under suspicion of having done the work of that scheming
viperous slim-legged bitch-! I took her arm-it had happened before
I knew it, an involuntary action of help-and drew her towards a chair.
Her skin was hot and vibrant. It was like touching a wild animal with
all its native jungle strength intact. The touch shamed me in a deeply
physical way-where had my vibrancy gone? where the dynamic power in
nerves? She did sit down, or rather she blindly obeyed the command
of my hand. I asked her quietly, Now what does all this mean? Who is
the viperous woman? Little by little it transpired that there was a
neves
rumour about Sister Mahatma (who hase/ventured near the hospitall)e
S having put the dog-pills by the professor's bed. I too
sat down, facing her, E feeling a new pleasure (yes, new things happen
to a seventy-year-old body!) at being able to use my momentary position
as the calming nurse to feed my eyes on her hair, the skin of her face to
which lr excitement
given a gaudy glowing dark bloom, and her pass-
ionately tussled hair, her hands that bely in their delicacy and restraint
those predatory shoulders! I know she was astonished at my calm. (Nothing
about Sister Mahatma or anyone else on the island, including myself,


could interest or alarm me much just at this moment. One creature is
the sum of all my caresi) I said in a simple voice, Well, there are
always nasty rumours, and obviously some of them are going to be about
us here. But you must do something! she said-I can't bear to think
of that poor creature smarting under that whiplash, which I know so welli
I felt like jumping/and saying, No, not Sister Mahatma--lead your mind
back to me! I closed my eyes, realising to what slimpy primeval wastes
my boat is being drawn. I forced myself to think of that sister (for
a moment nearly hated). My favourite sister! I said (what is true)
that Sister Mahatma was of all the people I knew the most capable of
riding nasty rumours. But once these people start, she said, they can
entice the devil into her cell-you don't know them! If the devil
gets into her cell, I said with a laugh, she'll have to fight him, won't
she?-it won't be the first fight of that sort in this place over the
centuries! And what about those long talks we've been having? I went
on. Didn't we agree that everything we know through the mind is thoughts
and therefore the devil is only another thought? and therefore Sister
Mahatma must have the thought, and even need the thought, if he does
enter ber cell? and therefore the thought must already have been strong
in her? We are creating the world round us all the timefi said, md
we are only the victims of other people's spells and machinations if we
have failed to realise how much comes from ourselves, how little in the
end from the 'outside'! I said I thought we needn't worry about Siter
Mahatma.
There was a long silence-her head was down-and then sha said
quietly (always the unexpectedt), Why, then,isn't God just a thought too,
if everything is a thought? I said, But everything isn't a thought.
was
was
God is an experience. This is what all the quarrel its about, over the
centuries. For those who haven't had the experience, He is a thought,
on the same discursive level as the devil and other thoughts. But-


The bell rang that moment-it meant that Torquemada as we call him
had arrived for confession and Mass. If mild-seeming, sallow-faced,
stiletto-eyed Father Osnuna, our Dominican from the mainland, knew all
the thoughts behind my carefully orthodox smile he would have me scream-
ing at the stake. My heart was always with those Anabaptists and Luterani
as the Spaniards called them when the flames began to lick them and love
poured from their eyes! As Montaigne said, it is rating one's conject-
ures at a very high price to roast a man alive on the strength of them.
I went quickly to Sister Sophia and kissed her hand-yes! Then I was
gone. How cleverly I use situations, how quick I am to touch, to kiss!
Torquemada thought I had fallen in love with him, I'm sure-I beamed and
beamed Soa He fouldn't roast me for that!
I took what I call one of my porroning walks today. Yes, with my
silver-knobbed canel How I love this cane, the more ae the world mocks
it! I deliberately walked past the hospital-scene of recent terrorism.
I even looked up at the windows hoping for a glimpse of Sister (not my
sistin-doelzebub'al) Mahatma. Yes, I felt I needed her as I had that
high-booted muscular girl with tight-fitting jumper and button-nose who
suddenly appeared at the door in the Manhattan hotel. The enemy! How
we want to embrace her! The guilt, the desire for persecution, the
double personality welljlup and asks/for the embrace of death! Sister
Mahatma, I almost die for a touch of your wicked and probably unwashed
hands! Come down from your tower of evil machination and stand within
six metres of me so that I may smell you! How you must relish the golden
memory of the last bath you had about twenty years ago! And as for your
habit--did that ever see a cleaner's? Did you never hear, Sister
Mahatma, of the laundrymats that have come into existence since you were
born?--voluptuary centres!-never let your empty shaved head give them
a thought! And surely life was more satisfying in the Bedouin encamp-


ments where no water was available even for a quick wash? Water, like
the flesh, my dear, is a miragel Avoid its allurements and hold fast
to the Lord! And if you should be called a second time to the bedside
of a Jew, simply stand there for a time, your body odour will cayse far
more damage than dog-pills! I walked on, reflecting on these things.
The stiff, pointed, polished leaves of the paim-trees seeme quite diff-
erent to me now-they opme from a dry, wasted land, the sea all round
hap become eluggish, no longer covered by the sweet haze of Mediterranean
summer Ceicmciers esameet : 1 a -
but an ominous volcanic vapour.
She has changed the island for mel I feel the closeness of the Arab world.
I see holy murder flash in the air above the sea. And my silver-knobbed
cane is the sceptre of an exile, the last phyiscal testimony to a lost
kingdom where decency and forbearance prevailed.
I am no sooner back a-Bhome-with fifteen guests at the lunch
table, all of them nice people (for a couple of hours), and someone decides
to do the equivalent of throwing camel shit straight in my eye! He was
all on about how at Frederick 11's table in Naples Arabs and Christians
had
and Jews /sat side by side and talked about the ancient world. Apparently
old Fred the Hohenstaufen introduced Arabic numerals to us all, as well
as starting the medical faculty at Naples university. The Afabs even
had an advanced surgery! They taught the Spaniards all they knewl
Their marvellous culture was the basis and diving board of the Renaissance
etc. etc. etc., bla-bla-blal I pointed a sniff at every one of his
Was waimms for
remarks. I gulped my food so quickly that I
: bhed my dessert
before the others had got past their hors d'eouvre. Then I got up
and within shirty seconds of putting my head back in my kingdom of
decency, my sceptre leaning against my desk, gleaming thrillingly in
the shuttered afternoon darkness, I was off in the land of dreams.
Next morning I had to go to the mainland--for a medical check-up


as a matter of fact. There is a young German chap I always go to.
I enjoy the trip across, and get a tasi on the other side. Near the
hospital I slip into one of the bars for a coffee and croissants. I
sometimes sit outside and watch the loading at the harbour. This is guite
a little routine of mine. I end up with lunch down at the Plaza,/the
other side of town, where it tries to be the French Riviera. And a boat
back in time to squeeze an hour's siesta. Anyway, I said to this young
Kraut in as casual way as possible, I said, Don't know why I never go to
that local hospital of ours, it's bang opposite my front door you might
say--expecting him to laugh and then give me a long list of the legalised
murders that have been practised by the sisters over the years. Not
on your Aunt Nelly. He said, I wonder you don't too, it's just as good
as this place, from the equipment point ofliew, and much more convenient
for you. He was just on his way out, so we lunched together. Took his
degree at Hamburg. Wife and two small krauts. I talked about my army
of German relatives, and had him laughing about how the family fought
itself in the first world war. I have definite proof that my cousin
Frank took a pot shot at my uncle Helmut at Ypres and made a hole in his
Helmut! With the help of a bottle of yellow vintage piss I roared my
head off, and didn't give a shit that the doctor failed to understand.
Well, after we'd celebrated the end of the world with a glass of schnapps,
and he'd finished his lecture on ecology (apparently Mother Nature has
her knickers down at the moment)-not that I listened-he started
talking. about, of all people, our old friend Mother Superior, I could
have eaten my Mahatmal An interesting woman, A said. I nearly said,
So was Mrs Bonnie, not to mention Mrs Clyde. He said she had once
worked at the mainland hospital. Particularly successful in rehabil-
itating drug-cases. This pulled the smile off my face, as I have no
fewer than three sons hooked and stoned to the eyeballs. I won't say


I always did my best for them. I did, but I know how phoney it
sounds. I wept for theme I know that. I sent them to the best
schools. I - saw they were introduced to the best people, and by that I
don't mean a lot of damned snobs but the key people in well-nigh every
industry. I never kept them away from the dinner table if there was
somebody important coming. I let them order their own newspapers, that
Ema
sort of thing, I let their girls comejand go though of coubse I drew
the iM line at people screwing all over the house. (When I was a kid
we weren't allowed our own wristwatch/until we were turned eighteen,
let alone a screw in dad's bedroom). So, falling over themselves with
gratitude, my children have to start smoking! One taught the other.
I discovered the house had become a sort of dope market. Long-haired
was
vermin BEB calléng at the front door with small parcels, and sometimes
in the middle of the night. As one of them said when I came down to
answer the door at four o'clock in the morning and told him to piss off,
Oh, I had the impression the sun was shining. Timothy, my middle boy,
who went on facid, nearly poet pulled us down to hell with hime
puuch
Pecho-anellysts, hospitalisations, I shudder to think
out
how/I paid
in medical fees, only to be abused when they got their sanity back.
They look like funny young-old crocks now, all three of them, with lank
hairand sweaty yellow skins and shaking hands, and oh they think it so
cunning that they've had an experience which I haven't (though at my
expense). They each get an allowance, on condition that they keep
away from me. Like David I thought, deliver me from the hand of
strange children, children whose mouth speaks vanity,. and their right
hand a right hand of falsehood. They've all renounced the stuff now, so
they say-it means they only take grassa They live quietly in the
aftermath of their hallucinations, hoping to get back their will and
initiative, though with small hope, so they go on living on me.


A 3 S
I swallowed a second grappa with my Kraut doctor, add felt like death.
All this time he was talking quietly and reverently about the Mother
Superior, and I didn't get a word. Back home again I slammed the door
of my bedroom so as to wake my wife, because I now blame her for my
derelict sonsa She spoiled theme She must have done. She was always
finding excuses for them., I didn'y sleep. I wept again. Oh, Sister
Mahatma, wouldn't you bein your seventh heaven to see the tears oozing
out of my eyes as I lie gazing up at the ceiling? My wife knocks on
my door hesitantly and says, Are you all right?, and I give myself the
pleasure of not replying.
Lolling in the dark next to Cassandra, my jumper pulled up over my
bare brown belly after a madly garlicky meal, I find myself numbed with
ligashion.
fear, or it could be aud
MMR
I coax Cassandra totalk to me about
the desert, our days together Tangiers, her youth in the Aden Protect-
orate. I close my eyes, seeing the black tents of the Bedouin. I can
dred
all but smell the stiff dark abbas of the women (*something between eley
goat shit and opium*) and at last, unknown to Cassandra, I see before
me the loveliest nomad princess of the Sinai dands, with rings at her
toes, and turquoise necklaces chuckling at her neck, and e delicate
Rer
black veil hiding all but her eyes, andttbs abba disturbed ever so
little by her proud upright breasts and her hips that sustain the cloth
as she walks with that long stride which great distances and slipping
sand and much heat and thirst impose on the children of Islame Sister
Mahatmal And you have come across so much desert (where God is said
to have been born) to a poor Christian island to teach us not words
any more, for our religion has long been reduced to words, but the
look the face has, the texture the skin has, the shape the hand has,
when determined by divine illuminations! The numbness left me little
by little, and suddenly I felt an absurd dynamic joy. I sptood Ln


in the middle of the olive grove and let# out an enormous fart as
I sometimes do when overjoyed. Cassandra laughed in her throaty way,
as if yesterday's whisky were fermenting today's good cheer. She
joined me and we walked, danced between the trees until I fell into a
pothole with her on top of me, and we laughed until we were almost sick.
I slept like a dog, because a plan of action has formed itself in my
brain. From this time forth my thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth!
I was sitting gazing at a rare edition-pretty well the only one
I've ever owned--Antonio Beccatelli's Hermaphroditus, dated 1421-I
wouldn't let it go for fifty grand-when in strides THE GIRL THE BOOK'S
ABOUTI How she got in God alone knows! And she starts screaming abuse
ear,
at me, I can't believe my evee I just stare at her, wondering how she
managed to get past Miranda, and being in the strangest (and not at all
unpleasant) way reminded of our New York days when rows flared up and
she stood in front of me, her trunk bent forward, her hands on her thighs
for support, the yellows of her eyes seeming to slide out of her face
because she is shouting so much, just as she is doing nowl I kngw she
Reaps
kapt a knife in her trousers, tucked into her socks, and I jumpel up,
backing towards the french windows and dragging my blanket with me.
also
capast
IJknaw I contdett rely on my wife, supposing she wes in the house, or
rather I E afraid that, buried in her mathematics (the current night of
will
her soul), she P hear and come running, and fall under the Sophian
spell again! The abuse was all about Sister Mahatma, whoever that might
be. She really must have gone mada I always said it. She raved on-
How dare I something or other? In future she would defend people against
my aalumnies, my verminous insinuations-that she loved Arabs (this I
knew from the number of live sheikhs she always brought back to our
apartment in Harlem)-and the dog pills ought to have killed me-and I
had survived them through not having a heart! And then, as I realised
did
she must (because she always, on previous occasions, Nat), she burst


240 Se
into tears like a vast child, and dashed out of the room, straight
into the arms of an astonished Miranda, who exclaimed, Miss Sophial,
before she was given a wet kiss and hug. Then the house was as empty of
her as it has been for these five years past, and Miranda and I stood
gazing at each other in the silence of my wife's mathematical studies
three doors down, until I shrugged my shoulders resignedly, and returned
to my chair. What is all this about? Everyone seems to come to the
house to talk about Sister Mahatma. First the Renegade, then Medusa
herself. And if I knew who Sister Mahatma was it would be a help.
When, a few minutes later, my wife came into the room, busy pencil in
hand, and asked what a square root was ('surely they are usually round?')
I told her after a long pause, and with a serene smile, A square root,
my dear, that is simply a root seen mathematically, and her Aht of
understanding as she left the room would have convinced Euclid himself
that there was something in my explanation. Between fools and madmen
the island basks in her careless sune Sit still, I thought, and hear
the last of our sea-sorrow, for the end will not be long. I decided to
say nothing to her about the Sophian visit.
Fhis
sea
Fra was a morning of scirocco when the E sent up snarling and
dirty waves and the air hung dead over the island, a sick pall. The
animals slept. Even the pigeons ceased to flap about heavily on the
roofs, and Sister Brigitte stayed in her cell all morning. I don't know
why I should couple her with the animals, my mind is under a pall too,
all my thoughts are down inside that imprisoning triangle where the
digestion thunders and grinds, and the waste is evacuated, and the
serpent that should lie coiled up in happy anonymity is furtively
raising his head. I think I must have gone to the chapel a hundred
times today. Feeling a thousand tons in weight. And remembering
all the heavens I have been through in the last twenty years-all one
derer


Khe
heaven though they seem multitudes because each time feels ER the first,
when E divine dust settles on the head, and the glands and tissues and
warring muscles go into a deep quiet that is beyond sleep or even rest,
and you want to drink and drink at thesoeverlasting er waters of life.
And now all this is a memory. It seems I can be flung down into the pit
of darkness as if all my daily wars over decades had been nothing. But
I reject this thought at once. Time-thinking is body-thinking! I
cling to the intellectual conviction that all this is being done to an
end, and is under controllt remember something Sister Mahatma said, that
the intellect is for keeping balance. I have to be patient. Perhaps I
was getting too proud, seeing others fall, rehabilitating others all the
time. In a most abject moment, walking across the garden back to my
cell after putting maize for the doves, it crossed my mind that I must
force myself never to see her again, and then-looking up-I saw that
thought physically crushed to the ground, as she herself rushed out towardst
me, my fellow-prisoner in the triangle, whom I have almost started to
blame! Her hair a thousand snakes trying to wriggle themselves free,
sweat pouring down her face, arms akimbo like a bear's-she expresses
in her body all I feel, the fevered anguishl-but how can I minister to
her now, how speak with someone else's tongue as Iflused to-for I only
have my own poor human tongue now, I am mortall She stops, hardly pauses
to say hullo. And again the subject is Sister Mahatma, Sister Mahatmal
Shall I never be free of this wild storm? But where could I go, my
darling, if I cannot find you again? if I sit patient in the silence,
my eyes closed, and my dove that art in the clefts of the rock, in the
secret places of the stairs, fails to come to mel what am I without
your wings that take me up? But love cannot be killed! I suddenly
thought this, in a crescendo of triumph-I heard nothing she said
about Sister Mahatma--I was strong again, he had come to me again, I


had a voice to speak with! For many waters cannot quench love, neither
can the floods drown itl If a man would give all the substance of his
house for love, it would be utterly contemned!
All the time she talked I forced other words into my head-lly
beloved is the chiefest among ten thousand, his head is as the most fine
gold, his locks are bushy, and black as a raven, his eyes are as the eyes
of doves by the Arivers of waters, washed with milk, and fitly set!
And as we walked on to the stone terrace in front of my office I
was clear and contained again. The sun is shining! Yet when I looked
up I saw that it was a sultry, sickly day-but for others now, others!
Suddenly I Joved the mist-dimmed, yes even the sick,sunlight that gave
unuholesome
the earth trembling shadows. And I listened to her. Shels telling me
that I must realise how an Arab girl feels, alone here, accused of trying
to murder a Jew. What a terrible imputation! she sayso And am I going
to do nothing? I took her into my room-yes, it is blessedl-and it
received us like a fountain of gardens, a well of living waters and
streams from Lebanon. Please listen to me, I told her. Sister Mahatma
e child 2 a Hindu tamily.
is from India,l She is no Arab. She was educated in a convent close to
Bombay and was sent here ten or twelve years ago. She never worked in
the hospital. She never set foot there. "Mahatma' means 'most holy one'.
From her I learned almost everything.
That evening I told Cassandra what I had done. I was wearing a
pfto-flowered shirt with the sleeves rolled up, looking neat and clean.
I had just taken a bath, and had squirted, sprinkled, dabbed lavender
water on all parts of my person. I let her cook a simple meal. We
put the day's cablegrams aside. Batches of them arrive to announce
arrivals. Some day soon I must step on a plane and attend to arrears
of business. The little apartment in Manhattan (far from their's)
is hardly real for me nows I can face it easily-the late nights,


the hour-long efforts to keep a deal afloat, the endless long-distance
calls--because only this, what I have just been through, is real to me
now. As always, I have been helped. I mean I needed to stay here,
and apparently by accident a few deals came to me over the phone, without
leave te inand
me having to mons-anymiers to clinch them. What events have shaken/ these
last five days: what infinite powers the Clever One has, to somersault
our thoughts at a whim, and translate us without our moving a muscle or
a habit into worlds we never knew could exdst! Who is Cassandra?
I look at her heavys fallen breasts that used to stand to attention so
sweetly, twenty and thirty years agos for those seilor boys with their
voyaging fingers, and at the low round neck of her dress in a long-since
outmoded style, and at her zather flat, moist, passive lips as they
hungrily and guiltily receive a drink or a cigarette, and I ask myself,
How can this body be the reservoir of anything individual? The body
is a thought, Mother Superior says, a thought to Cassandra and a thought
to me, received through all kinds of heard and seen and felt impressions
that are then formulated into what looks like real life, but this form-
ulation aan be changed at short notice-we can be moved into heaven or
hell, and this body is suddenly seen as a vehicle, a receptacle, an excuse
for the dreams and the thoughts thet clang like bells and thetight that
alters like the cleverest stage lanterns! I hug her and kiss her, and
tell her-tell myself-tell the nightl-what I did this morning when
I strode into the Aaron house. She chuckles. She asks me in that
throaty imperial way of hers, Was he surprised? I said, I didn't
notice. And we laughed. Was he afraid, do you think? she asked.
Yes, mortally, I said, I gave him the most fearful moment of his life,
and I'm immensely grateful to have requited Sister Mahatma in that one
small respect which she will never know about.
When I jumped out of-my chair clutching my blanket (and letting


the precious Hermaphrodi itus go fly), I felt not the slightest fear. I
kngw she could not touch me. The power of prayer protected me. I was
perfectly aware of this. And in those few moments she exorcised the demon
of herself for me. In the last few years she had become a mountain for
me, impassable, a shadow thrown across all my paths. Only now am I able
to see that. And here she was, a human being again, the creature I had
known in so many stifling situations in New York. I feel enormously quiet
again, A telltale sign that I say nothing to my wife, whose face has
taken on the look of an hypotenuse triangle. My impression of Sophia (I
can say the name without the slightest tremor) as a tormented Gentile
also helped to end my attachment to her, my terrible attachment of hatred.
Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned of his
mother? I dozed for the rest of the day in the island's dreaming silence,
as it lies cupped in glittering water, its sea-breeze climbing softly over
my face, anointing mee My wife's snores reverberated down the corridor
with Euclidean regularity,
Sleeping so deeply that I seemed to have slid down a trep of forget-
fulness under the island, I realised what my next step of self-liberation
must bee From mathematics to mathematical shapes! It has been revealed
to me that the inner form of life is mathematical. Therefore mathematical
shapes must surely show the essential rhythms of life, the essential harmonics,
the essential conflictso I wanted to dance softly round ty room on bare
feet, I felt I had made such a discovery! Andhll in silencel Not a
sound from his room, or from the kitchen. Had I been a snorer perhaps,
the spell wouldn't have worked. But my deep contented silent breaths
brought a corresponding rhythm out of the earth. Yes, mathematical shapes!
any
I must order the clay. I shall make)Donatello look like a snapshot.
A little question occurs to mes would Sophia market the pieces for me?
She is good at that. My husband *takes a lick off' some of her deals,


In mean she really does have business acumen. She knows how to promote.
For a reason I cannot discover, I feel close to her today, just as if
she had been to this house. My soul is among lions.
What's Mahatma to him or he to Manhattan, that he should weep for
her?
Who spoke?
Are you there my darling? My hands are doing a slow breast-stroke
along your placid sea-bed.
I was asleep and-what happens once in twenty years or SQI started
awake, sat up, stared at my refglected shadow in the huge mirror opposite
my bede I almost called for Cassandra. But fell back limply again.
Could have sworn someone was trying to make love to me. My bed was as
smooth as a sea-bed, then a storm rose up and tossed its surfaces. How
we meet, even in sleep! But who were you? And, more aptly, who was I?
Was it even my body you were trying to touch? "My* body? What absurdities!
To argue possession, of such a thing as a body, that is suddenly there,
and we enter it, and never lose the sense of being strangers to it.
Is my body really more familiar to me than anyone else's? It comes to
me through my senses-so does everyone else's! I fell asleep. With
pleasure I listened to my own snores, which boom like temple gongs in
Kashmir. I dreamt that someone akged me what sex I was. I said a
woman. He said, How do you know? I said, A psychologist told me.
I woke at ten, when the heat was heavy on the roofs, and Cassandra
had to sit through three black coffees before she could get a whistle
out of me. I leaned up in bed trying to focus on her and yawning like
a baker's ovene She asked me what part 6f the Middle East Sister
Mahatma came from, and I said, India I think. She laughed and said,
No seriously, could it be Cairo? I said, Yes, possibly. Ah, she
said, they're not strictly Arabs. It explains how she grew up as a


Christian, she seid. Yes, I said, the oven-doors opening and closing
again, but she has the Bedduin in her blood, the desert in her feet!
How come feet? Cassandra asked with a little crack of her voice that
implies jealousy. I mean the stride, I said, and open slid the oven-
doors again.
I prayed behind Sister Mahatma. I could tell just from her erect
back, which is sometimes motionless in prayer for an hour or more, that
she knew everything that had happened, to me and to herself. Now I am
so happy to have kept faithe I feel sweetly tired. The serpent has
coiled himself up, but I don't care if he wakes again. If I am compound-
ed of eternity, what can I lose or gain? Nothing changes. Nothing
moves.
It isn't simply that I have nightmares, I have ridiculous dreamse
And their ridiculousness troubles me more than the fleshy horror of the
nightmares, that always seem to lurk in a state of matter half way
between mucous and tissue. I simply cannot see why nonsensical situations
should queue up to come into my mind night after night. I was cutting
a roast in last night's dream and instead of passing a plate to one of
the female guests I passed her my trousers. You know how dreams are.
My trousers were still on but nevertheless there I was passing them to her
in what I supposed to be a succulent mmor bundle. Another night I was
playing tennis with my silver-knobbed cane, though I have never played
tennis in my life (golf is my game-all right, now sneer). Another
night I was driving a bus by blowing at it from behind, and taking the
fares. These are only bits and pieces of situations that Aperpetuate
themselves from absurdity to absurdity in a way I can't follow even a
second after I have woken up (I sometimes say 'woken down', because I
get such degressions first thing, until the pre-coffee walk). Surelty
all these tricks the mind plays (both the ridiculous dream-situations
and the waking depressions) could be rationalised outif only we knew


the right method. It's obviously not something I should go to an
kuow brecisel
analyst with. I mean, I Mmt
why I have the auroral depress-
ions it is because I can never think of anything in the coming day that
will provide pleasure or reveal its point. Thus, after ridiculousness
all night, the ridiculousness of the coming day pours down on mel And
I earnestly believe that the reason lies in the fact that we have attained
all these tremendous advances over previous geperationsm and previous
civilisations, without our personal equipment so to speak keeping pace.
Knowledge has outpaced the human nervous system (for a time). We are
surrounded by every form of mechanical success, from the just-right warm
shower in the gleaming bathroom to the faultless film seen in the air-
conditioned cinema, but the ancient blood continues to stamp its war-dances
inside us. One day, though not in my lifetime, these things too will be
mastereds scotched in childhood, neatly cured in age, by techniques that
will necessarily evolve as the smooth functioning world jamakes its purely
functional demands on the inner creature. It is just like, say, acupuncture.
Whenever that was mentioned aty one time I used to make a loud aniff, and
say something like, Yes, in darkest Africa they go one better than that,
they dip their javelins in poison before they throw them, to be certain
of a killl Now of course I realise that there have been a number of
wilk acupuncture
clinical successes/and some serious doctors from the west have actually
witnessed the operations, and even sometimes practice them themselves.
I go further than thats I believe that one day this method will be in-
corporated into valid medical practice, and for all I know every hospital
will have its needlemen. But before that happens we have to find out
about the processes going on behind it. There must be an explanation.
Of course the Chinese have always put forward some sort of mystical
argument, about the cosmos and all that, but there must be a real ex-
planation somewhere. Until that is found, by experiement, the method


has to be doubted whatever its success. For only experiment and observ-
ation can, as Leonardo da Vinci said, be the basis of certainty. Phewl
I am in the same state es the island at this moment-torn and whipped
by furious winds. The fragile olives are being stripped from the trees,
the vines are falling from their supports. What little humidity there was
left in the parched earth, growing paler, cracking every day, is being
dispelled into clouds that race along and pile up in one black monster
too high to give us raine And every screaming gust, fetching another
acacias
branch down from the holm-oaks or the exprenses scudding the dust and
sand along the terraces, scooping up the blackly shining metallic sea in
contemptuous armfalls, shouts Sister Brigitte or Esmeralda or Mahatma or
Mother Superior in my ears and my poor jumping heart, my halted breath
and inflamed tomres bowels seem themeelves to be contrary winds, out of
harmony with each other, not belonging to the same body. Each year I
am burned on a sacrificial slab in this way, as the Mediterranean air,
infuriated by the pollutions of our time, goes frantic with sudden des-
perate cloudbursts, with dry winds that chase each other like hungry
beasts across the sky for weeks on end, and the hailstorms that lay
quick black hands on the vine-crop and bring the farmers running down
their slopes to light remedial fires, and then floods, and then snow in
summers and heat-mists that blackes out the valleys and scorch the leaves
all
when the sun comes up. And I am all naturel I feel it/in my glands!
I am wracked with the weather-yarments. I creep to one of the farmhouses
feeling as grey as my hairs and sit among them at table and talk about it
allg how the world is tired of its humanfurniture, until I feel restede
Simple people always rest me in this way. They are my secret reguge in
trouble. And then when the raging winds have stopped I go back to my
bedroom with the vast mirror and don't even trouble to look at the damage
to the olive grove or the vineyard, much less the garden round the house,


but accept it all, I receive the storms inside me and the storms outside,
uniting them undery one humbled conviction (for I am ancient) that if the
world is to go, then it must, and I plunge into its wars without resistant
tension, just as I once saved myself in a long fall by putting out my arms!
like wings and genuinely flying. How I remember that fall. Only my
shock when I saw how far I had fallen made me take to my bed afterwards.
There were no bruises. I know I am being called to the convent by some-
one, something, but I feel an enormous sleepiness and am unable to drag
harettine
my feet there, and instead pull myself up the steep)steps to my room,
with only energy enough to ask Cassandra to bring me a little toast, 'a
little nice something'. I am too swept by the winds to be able to dream
evens and the names Mahatma, Brigitte, Esmeralda stand before my eyes now
like written signs, and my attempt to extract pleasure from them, a glance
or a touch of the buttock or a sigh, fails utterly. I am just too near
the resth. And in a moment sleep has closed over mes and Cassandra has
of course not so much as moved from her chair, knowing that the request
for toast, said in that derelict voice, means only 'help me', though no
help could be given against the dark and soothing hand, that, because it
imitates death so successfully, makes us feel afraid for a moment, just
before it closes our eyes. I had just enough time to flop down on the
feather mattress, my boots still on, before the silent imitator did his
gentle work.
If it weren't for that imitator my body would long since have been
torn to shreds by its winds of feeling, though in post mortem it would not
show a trace of violence. I am saying this in sleep.
For a whole week I have had no word from her. My memory is unable
to tell me what she looks like any more-that fatal sign of attachment
deeper than visual observation can measure, a sign I thought I would never
live to mdfre again. The heart beating fast when Miss Sophia' is men-


25a
tioned by Esmeralda # (wes it breathlessly? though I believe they never
once spoke together). The loving mind is fogged, sweetly and securely!
Am I afraid she will never come again? No. Why don't I send word to
her house that she 'should not abandon us down here altogether, enclosed
arch
though we are', something a L -sounding like that (A Mother Superior
tone)? Because I want her to stay away, at least for a times as we grow
in spirit we become perilously powerful, and things tend to happen as we
need them to happen. And I really do need the space and time, the hours
in my garden and the chapel, to formulate my plans, and test their sound-
nesse She has left me with a feeling of detachment I thought I moufia
achiere:
never taves I am no longer tied to this convent by the slightest feeling.
Tlay Rave
We have been torn by winds in the last few days. E screamed round
the gables, rattled the water-piping like € madmen, torn limbs off the
acacias and left the oleanders in shreds, and half the night I listened
to it calmly, because it sounded like all the knots bénding me here being
blown free. Sister Mahatma ailways used to talk about 'a young tree
having to be fenced round for protection', then 'sturdy, its roots deep
and strong, the most violent winds cannot move it'. That was how I
felt. My roots are now deep and wide, and I don't need the convent,
my wire fence, any moree I knew that I was being taken somewhere,
in this midsummer infatuation I have just been through, which I remember
with happiness though there was no pleasure in it (but what does pleasure
have to do with happiness?). I kept faith, in my minde Thank God for
that. I knew that all those years of sacrifice and ecstasy could never
be undone, because there is no greater power than the power which engineer-
ed them! And now I am in the open again, refreshed, I see what has been
done. She put me to trial. Tugging me into the world, she proved I
could survive it. That is not quite well put. I means the convulsions
my love put me through did not in the end shake me to pieces. So I am


no longer enclosed. I am in the worlde The convent is, more likely,
enclosed in me. I could only be a spectator here, from now one I even
omit to pray in the chapel. I sit there, or kneel, for the forme I
need no formulae any more, not even the most sacred-no songs, no sweet
routines of vespers or dawn-meditation, no confessions (least of all).
What would my confessor, Torquemada, say? Well, I won't try to imagine.
He never needed a wire fence to protect hime a weed will grow anywhere,
and eventually strangle the life out of everything else that is hopeful
and geen nearby. I say this to myself without dislikes the attachment
of dislike has gone too. Now you shall never leave me, Christ-you are
my son, my father, my lovert my friend! you are in my walk, my breathing,
my sleep! how can I pray to you if you are no longer outside?
I remember her so well, when she was hardly twenty, Sister Mahatma,
and her way of saying things quite uninvited, and connected to nothing you
had said or thought yet burningly relevant to your most secret state at
the
that timed Given my country of origin, I find it hard to shake off ideal-
ism, and its attendant whore moralism. I used to call it 'the little
Martin Luther inst me'. He always seemed to be talking in the silence,
about E how this doctor yawned too much in the operating theatre (it
was the mainland hospital) and that sister should talk a little more to
the women patients and less to the men, in an endless nagging speeche
sta M
And one day Sister Mahatma said apropos of nothing, with a priest a ning
there (he simply smiled at her politely), Other people are ourselves.
So doubt of others is doubt of oneself. Then she looked at me (as if
she
the words had come to her and,was only hearing them) and asked, Isn't that
true? I saw how deep an ego-infatuation (Sophian wordsl) moral thinking
argued, and fought with it night and days identifying myself fervently
with the blamed one, repeating to myself that whatever someone else did


was a matter for Gad, and had a meaning. I fought it like a lusts
but I saw it was much more dangerous than anything to do with the simple
flesh, as lust wase I realised that my deep dissatisfaction with others
was a (justified) deep dissatisfaction with myself. And gradually I saw
that the long fight was on a much wider front than I had thought at first:
it was to rid myself of the ego's attachments, and the grappling irons of
hate and love that it threw around everyone it met. And, with that, I
realised that a real and lasting attachment to others was growing in me
as the false, ego-bound one fell away. Every patient became my child,
my father, my friend, every doctor and sister a messenger from whom I
could learn another secret message. I did learn an extraordinary amount
in this way. It was strange, people 'brought' me information just when
ttem.
I needed it. I had laid myself open to d I still could not suffer
whon
evil with equanimity. That is a very long road yet. But now/I saw
Torquemada--smelt him too (he is mediaeval enough to look on washing as
a dangerous pleasure)-I began to notice his lazy kindliness, especially
to children, his ignorant hope in the simple hierarchies of are powers his
serene acceptance of his own mean excitement whenever Esmeralda brushed past
(she always brushes the floor close to her victims). And I began to love
Esmeralda, with her easy rolling laugh. And from that time my power with
others (I don't want to say 'power over*) began. For the first time I
found the convent easy to run (I had left the mainland hospital by now),
because I left it - run itself. And when I had occastion to criticise,
another voice seemed to speak for me, with all the mors authority because
there was no selfly concern, no ego-striving, behind it. I began to live.
I was already nearing seventyl


In the course of the Mother Superior speaking above I began to notice
a different tone of voice. It wasn't precisely a vocal matter either.
Before, she always spoke earnestly, in a smooth eloquent rushg it was
the voice of someone who had spent many hours in silent thought. But the
ardour still-how can I put it?-argued an interest, to convert, to do
good, to change someone. So it conveyed, necessarily-ardour tends to-
a sense that she was not quite home and dry in her faith.. And, in the
above, this disappaared. It was an even tone, the words came not only
with authority-she always had that-but as if she were reading them from
her own mind. She no langer argued as if she wanted to persuade someone,
or clarify her own mind (the major reason for all discursive speech).
And what had happened to change her tone? She no longer had interests.
She no longer loved 'this' person or 'that'. She was simply in a state
of love. It is this, as far as I can understand it, that makes her feel
"free' of the convent. She never actually says this, but I have a sense
of her being able now to radiate love in the world-I mean no longer from
behind conventual walls. The walls, hitherto a neceaaary 'fence round the
young tree', are now an obstanle. Interesting also that, being a woman of
work, she now needs to take it up again afpter only a few years behind the
enclosure. But I feel perhaps I am wrong here. Work, arguing interest,
isn't any more in her minde She no longer wants her way to God prepared
for her-no more conventual routines, no protective wallss Yes, wark
wittout
she will-the work of her life-if that means changing the world Et
any action or word on her part, simply by being in it, and by being the
same as everyone else.
It could easily have been the Mother Superior who said *What's Mahatma
to him or he to Manhattan, that he should weep for her? Thinking of


Aaron, she might have 'seen? his sudden freedom from ego-attachment to
Sophia, in his no longer hating her. 'Sister Mahatma? and his "Manhattan
memories' were no longer operative, destiny-wise, for hime But we are
getting into uncharted waters here. But I cling to this possibility,
now
without knowing why-that she can/'see' into situations she does not
"knows about. Perhaps this capacity has grown in her with the diminution
of 'interest'. But then, I cannot even be sure that it wasn't Euripides
himself talking!
And now--enter Pamelal
She tiptoed into the lounge. I gasped, jumped up, half-laughing.
Such a smile, such hair (competing with the early yellow sun), such legs
that carried her body reverently! I managed to get myself out of my
early-morning slough. I was so astonished to see a stranger, suddenly
there, that for a moment I thought I must be far, far away at another


marvels
place on the Sophian jet-route, not in my own home. What things are
happening to me latelyl
The house,
the olive trees began to dancel Yes, without knowing her from Eve I
Eelt all the dancing in the universe suddenly encapsulated here in my
house, on this island, everything had dancing feett I had slept like an
ox in a stable, so deeply that I had to look twice at my feather bed after-
wards to make sure I wasn't still lying there, the imprint of my body
deep,
being so serfeeta after ten hours of steady damp-ironing. And as fresh
as the dawn, with the sea flashing serene messages across the terraced
hills, in she floats like the original sylphide! No name, no nationality,
no parentagel What angel wakes me from my flowery bed? And her legs,
my eyes travelled up and down those endless magic stilts! And how the
trunk sits small and erect and compact and still on them however fast
she movest And the tiny head blazing with sea-bleached yellow hairi
And the smile that is a dance in itselfi And how the island-light
behind her seems to hold and support herl And all this undeserved,
unexpected-yet (now that I see her) deeply desired and waited-for!
Yes, all my life has been a waiting for this! And I never knew I was
waiting! much less what I was waiting forl And now my life is ex-
plained, perfectly motivened -the greater part of it rendered in a
moment a long anteroom where I waited patiently for admission to the
blazing thronel Just as I was about to speak and break the spell,
Cassandra came down the stairs on her heels, like a coffin being hammered
home, and said with last night's whisky tossing her words about like
drunken seamen in a rolling long-boat, Pamela caught the early-morning
ferry, slept in the waiting-room on this side all night, but she's
young. All follawed by such enormous intakes of breath that I was
repfrieved of the necessity of saying anything. I simply grapzed her
hand (Pamela's). It was like taking a tiny sea-animalghot and writhing


underwater mysteries! And we both laughed. So you've comel I felt
like crying-you let me into the throne-room! And, forgetting Cassandre-
forgetting that she had ever existed-indeed, de-existing her in the
most magical way (I noticed her heavy breathing stop with a screech of
brakes when it found it had no sympathetic audience)-I took her lightly
by the elbow (a most significant and sensitive part of the body) and
ushered her into the garden. And I sent up a clamorous prayer of gratitude
for having at last been bornl
And when we were out of sight of the house I sat down between two
olive trees. She sank to the ground like Vera Trefilova doing the
sleeping beautyl Ah! she sang with relief, closing her etes, a smile
still on those all-too-eatable cherries of her cheeks (but they must
only be tasted, touched, never consumed-I shall protect you, my
childee, Xou shall be the sun in my room, and by night my moont)
A sleepless night in a waiting room? I asked, or was it the port?-
you must be exhausted! The only answer was a wider opening of the
cherries to reveal such muscular white teeth, such perfect architectural
blocks of sweetly moist ivory, that I still to this day (it is only
two hours 220) cannot tell whether I planted my lips straight on to
them or remained where I was, sitting lazily at her side. Then,
hand
surprise of surprises, she stretched out her/um with a laugh and began
tickling the bare skin of my arm with naughty whispering - fingers!
Of course she must know me-from somewhere along the Sophian route-
someone's daughter, probably. In a moment we were romping together,
running between the trees, falling, shouting, grappling with each other.
She found a tall acacia tree and swung on a branch. She tiptoed, ran,
leapt, she even danced a step or twol I raced, stormed, plunged
acress the heavy, parched sods, until Cassandra's imperial high command
voice, smart with red shoulder straps, shouted down from the house,


Sophia, you'll hurt yourself! Not as much, I Athought, gathering my-
self up off the ground, as I shall hurt you if you don't take your
binoculars off this olive grove. I visualised having to double her
poteen that evening, and indeed this is what happened.
Pamela was the first name, and something quite unbelievable because
immediately forgettable like Strangeways or was it Hollingford? We
were at tea, with the shutters closed, in the cool half-darkness of the
lounge in which marvellous projects are germinated and the expectant body
lies sweating gladly in a lazy easy chair. Cassandra had gone out,
most unwillingly-I had said to her, Listen, our whisky supplies don't order
themselves, we're getting low, in fact down to half a bottle (which is
Pres enough to freshen her upper leaves but not to get down to the roots).
Pamela and I ramped again, in the half darkness. It transpired that
inla
she had just graduated from a dancing academyea/a corps de ballet in
Amsterdam. She stood on her points, using me, as a dancing bar. I
chuckled and clucked. She did pas de cuatresand fouettés all over my
bedroom upstairs, and my eyes were unable to decide which were lovelier,
her actual silent leaps or their reflection in the mirror. How erect
her body! how firm the tiny head on her spine, how motionless-stiff
but utterly light-when her long legs, that seemed to climb lovingly towards
her trunk, did the carrying and launching, like a young colt with its
first rider gripping its back while the frens, audacious legs do their
marvellous business. The original Taglioni sylphide, yes! Virginia
Zucchi, Legnani, Duncan herself were suddenly alive before mel The
cruelly alluring scent of flowering jasmine drifted through the widdows
with the first evening coolness, and suddenly I was Legat, Nijineky,
Woizikovsky all in one as she jumped towards me and--how did it
happen?-I held her high in the airs whirled her gound, suddenly
discovering in my natural way the male dancer's secret of support,


floating her down to the ground again noiselessly, her firmly tense,
spare, voluptuously muscular trunk close to mine, and her sweat quietly
outdoing the jasmine in allurement, and her plips smiling, moist, close
to my cheek, and her hair radiating so much light in the dimness that I
was aware of her and the room with its smilingly confirming mirror as a
great Matisse all round mee We fell on the bed laughing, began romping
there too-soft, confined quarters obliged the game to obey a whole new set
of rules. We jumped, we tickled, we sprang, we growldd like animals-
when all of a sudden there was a sound below, not loud but of that deliber-
ately planted quality when someone wants to spoil your fun without in any
way intruding. We sighed and gasped ourselves to a halt and I sat on
the edge of the bede It must be Cassandra, who had found the shop
closed, or their whisky out of stock, damn her, or perhaps she had stopped
at the bistrot down the hill and staggered back to the house soused to the
eyeballs. I walked downstairs, drawing a silk gown over my aakedness,
and there to my astonishment, standing quidt still in the shuttered room,
was the Mother Superior,
My sense of detachment from the convent (I almost said 'my feeling free
of the convent') didn't happen in a moment, as I realised the moment it
had happened. For years I had watched Torquemada's comings and goings,
less
and wondered how far his ignorance was Rak a falling-short of the Church
tkan
deliberately and designedly Her doing. I was always aware
of the reformer in me, a talkative trio of Anabaptist pure-love, Zwingli
temembereal those
civic duty and Calvinism. But I often bmt-in-mbnd-tin nails embedded
points upwards in the parapet of the San Marco pulpit where Savonarola
was due to preach: he always hammered home a scathing point with his
fist at just that spot on. the parapet. Florence had had enough of his
government by sermons The more I vituperated in the silence of my brain,
bleed
and the more my fist pounded, the more my right hand began to ache, and
I thought I would lose the use of my fingers, so strong was the impression


this story left me with, as if the nails were meant for mee The
crisis was provoked, no doubt, by my being a German in the Mediterranean.
Now these voices have left me, and I realise that Torquemada, all the
time I was amused by him, and pitied him, was nearer to Christ than
myself because his obsessive interest in sin was at least steeped in
pleasure-how can I put it-he trembled at the things he felt. His
lingering bloodshot glances at Esmeralda (whose bosom manages to suggest
itself under the loosest habit), his limp sweating handshake that seemed
to draw all your latent carnal thoughts through your fingers into his
trembling palm, even his stink had something submissively long-suffering
about la without remorse or recrimination, because the flesh was
still God's pleasure of creation and Christ had after all chosen to
clothe himself in it for a time. When Torquemada talked about lust he
at least knew what he was talking about. He didn't turn it into devils
outside him from which he was immune, as I did. His prayers, mechanical
and deeply pagan, depending on repetition and not feeling, were touched
by his lust to a kind of sweaty fervours how many hail maries was a
glance at Esmeraada's curves worth? So he did, in a strange reptilian
ways his heavy belly always close to the ground, in prayer or sleep or
eating, communicate all the time with his God. I learned not to despise
lust. I learned that the serpent provoked the long journey towards
God, even gave a foretaste of heaven with its excitements, its ecstatic
horrors, I learned that mastery of lust was simply the eternal formula
for the realisation of great powers. When Sister Mahatma said that when
you realised God you felt a million sexual organs in your body opened
towards Him I wanted to clap my hand over her mouth. In a convent!
Abd slowly I realised that she was the only divinely realised person
among us, and that our religion went on in the brain, which is the last
place for it to function. I began to see that great powers were in


2 la @
hers she didn't shine with a light of virtue, as I was led to expect
from reading about my lifetime idol, St Clare of Assisi. There seemed
no great virtue in her. She spoke sharply sometimes, she was late and
sometimes lazy and unreliable (that is, whenever she wished to be).
O+ tather
But she did shine,
TAEI her presence Em
made the world shine. I began to learn that her body, and the
thrmgh and trmgh
thoughts of her bodys had been penetrated mimbmnt with living radiations
vo COC
frome divine force that the rest of us had come to regard as mental.
Even Torquemada was mental, by comparison! His body slumped and bulged inside
his chasuble like a sallow-skinned bag of lard, a prisoner in a cell of
obsessive desires, over-indulged in the matter of eating and drinking,
under-indulged in Athe matter of sex and nakedness, and trying to recoil
from the daily weight of guilt-laden food, trying to advance towards the
denied hot sexual encounter, with the result that the eating became a
vengeful snatching of what could legitimately be had, and sex an equally
vengeful imagining of what could not. A more erect and wholsesomely
fresh creature than Sister Mahatma you couldn't imagine. Every part
of her body she attended to each day. Her teeth shone a brilliant
white, And she moved in present time, always. She moved in real
life. How can I put it? The rest of us moved in a sort of artificial
space-time chamber that had been invented centuries aspo, dividing life
into past, present and future, with the seconds of the clock ticking
out at regular intervals the endless movement of the past into present
into future, like a snake swallowing a victim it could neither eject
nor containe I realised that the Christian warld had developed a
mathematical psychology (of which that strange instrument, the clock,
was a result), and that this must have had its origins in the first
monasteries that disciplined the barbarians of Europe into an ordered
society. I began to see how useful this mathematical sense of time


must have been to monks surrounded by tribal minds haunted by super-
stitious fears of the void where there was no regularity, no meaning,
no order. For those monks were themselves barberians. A rhyme kept
ringing in my head-Tick tock, a monk with a clocki That terr ible
yawning skys so feargul to the unbeliever (that iss/the believer in the
body), had to be contained. So, for every good deed a rewerd-'in
deed
the future' (heaven), for every bad EE revenge 'in the future' (hell).
And so, ticking out that fearful chasm of eternal time, that silence,
with serenely regular marks, order was imposede I began to see that
this extraordinary taming of the most unimaginably cruel and insensate
tribes the earth had ever seen, pouring down among the ruins of the Roman
empire and splitting the ancient Greek order into a million pieces,
terrorising the members of the old order and yet, like anmtals, E
quaintly beguiled and over-awed by that order, had happened only recently,
a mere thousand years agos a handfull of generations, amd that it was
therefore quite natural for us to beat the mental stage of religion
still, clinging to the mathematical formulation of life, unable to tap
Vedic
the real sources of power as Africans.)Indians, Perufivians and Mexicans
and Hindus and Buddhists had done centuries ago.
heme
I then saw that while St August-
ine and St Benedict had started the stupendous barberian-taming operation,
this aprii had only now entered its productive stage, after centuries
of ghastliness which anly barbarians could have called civilisation,
culminating in two wars that nearly did away with the human race altogether.
Now we cannot believe in the future. Global destruction is too easy
for any picture of the future to be sincerely felt. And the collapse
of a major element in the mathematical formulation of life has brought
the whole order low, and revealed its artificiality. A


Now we quiver and quail. The earth all but ruined. Sky and sea
refuse dumps. Yes, we achieved order, but it was all upstairs in the
brain! We did not in fact teach the barbarian how to live in the
world, He learned to ofder his thoughts, but the earth and even his
body began to fall to pieces. And I could see that Sister Mahatma,
in herself, was not barbarian, She didn't walk like a barbarian.
Her touch had no barbarian heaviness. Herthoughts and cares had
a delicacy we simply could not imitate. They were natural in her, not
self-developed. She offended our order-"late', 'unreliable', But
the order she had went right through her. Her talk ranged into the
future as if it was already past, into the past as if it were to come.
Just her thinking argued a freedom that made our little 'order', so
primitively attached to routine and caloulation, seem-what it is
a frightened flight Promt the vast order that lies in the TE
stillness round use We had never learned to let that stillness permeate
uss For this reason the stillness of death was still a shock to us.
We were sunk in the earth, grovelling in matter. Her wholesomeness was
itself a perfect act of civilisation. Some of the sisters were still
scared, in this day and age, to see themselves naked! As a result they
sometimes stank a bit high, until I put my foot down on matters of self-
hygiene. The barbarian again! Dark fears and remorses! And Sister
Mahatma's talk about 'a million sex organs turned to God* could only
seem carnal to the barbarian minde I saw how little power the rest of
us had, compared with her, I mean power of an immediate supernatural
kind, that radiates a special sweet optimism. When I began to see all
this I became free of the convent in the sense that I no longer needed
it, but found a power growing inside me F which could not recognise
1 order in routine and therefore chafed at conventual routine. Now
I simply want to be. And even as I think this I realise that if I had


Sister Mahatma's freedom, in every pore of my skin, in every thought,
I mean
freedom from the world, from the unreality, I would stay on
at the convent, its routines would be no more to me than a dream. I
wanted to say all this to Miss Sophia as I stood before her in the
suttered lounge, but all I found on my lips was, I just called in to
see how you were, my child-and (as I sat down with a tired sigh),
We began to think you had abandoned us.
I know Sophia likes to think of me as a drunkard, so I lingered in
town, to give her time to imatine me dropping in at that smelly bistrot
down the hill. Partly it excuses the whisky she likes to drink. But,
more, it gives her a quaint sense of comfort to think of a drunkard at
her side night and day-ayes blazing with lost adventures and disappointed
quests, a kind of heroine of the abject surrender. She would never go
to the drinks cupboard and actually verify the number of bottles and our
rate of consumption. I think she likes to establish the people she
loves as on a sort of permanent risk-line. I am bravely drinking
myself into the grave (in fact, I am), a relic of Rule Britannia
pragmatie
watching American cruisers in the harbour with banguerons satisfaction,
my Alexandrian eyes dimmed with voluptuous memory. Even that pis true,
partly. But I wonder how far she hasn't invented mein the last few
years, really invented a new person, and with my loving cooperation,
for I would do anything for my Sophia. If I lost her I think I would
become the kind of lush she believes me to be now. Though, if I kept
this house, I would live on the relics of her presence, and follow her
echoes round the rooms, and induce her to inhabit my body by sleeping
in her bedend that sort of thing. I get really troubled sometimes.
-Har Sort gdhig
Methought a serpent ate my heart away, in a dreamx Sometimes I try to
catch at life but mostly I let it go, taking comfort in my own softness,
blentifu l
breasts and Bamfarkals sun-yellowed buttocks (I take a gasping


Itakepleame
swim in a rocky corner every day)a/in my slow hands and always moist
lips that slur their words, in my long stride that seems to halt
half way, in my silent reading with pince-nez on a chain at the tip of
my nose, looking like a plenipot's wife in the Delta fanned by Nubians,
as sompia says. All such a relief from my early arrogance, always
really
snubbing and dressing down. Not always. I don't/remember, -
I had wonderful friends. I couldn't have been too bad. What dreams
we occupyl All our lives we rehearse them by yearning for them, and
slowly we grow into theme I à can't say I've really attained anything I
deeply and truly wished for. Of course this can't be true. The one
creature I was missing, in those early sailor-boy days, when I thought
I could decoy my body into enjoyment of sex, was Sophia. Well, I
attained her. I could feel her and hear her everywhere, not knowing what
TRat war
for me,
it was I felt and heard. Years before we met. She had not yet] taken
on human definition, butwas inchoate like/thrilling sun-swathed shadow?.
and my pleasure lay in divining her future forme She came andrent, Rer phoslory
always without me understanding who or what this presence was that made
me tremble with expectation-it happened at the oddest times, at dinner
with local bigwigs, in the cinema, bathing. The visitations weren't
muck lass asilt a fulare person.
even defined enough to be connected in my mind with one anothany) Only
afterwards, when she had appeared in marvellously touchable form, did I
Rad been
realise that all those throbbing moments of elation were a unity.
All my life I believed that there could never be real enjoyment, any-
felt, with Eristolas Alexandne, tat reruu treakdoums aud sexual diserder
thing nporuinaly carnal,in crooked sex. - ( A woman edged near me once,
were Conrected.
an Egyptian, plump, with drowsy eyes, the wife of one of the Canal pilots,
and put her hand under one of my breasts-I had to laugh! Being in awe
of me socially (these were colonial times) she was obliged to laugh too
Rad been
and make it seem that the movement of her hand wa meant as a joke-
ofg potite
she thought it best to round ity as a/tickle, and I know she came to the


Hagefire.
conclusion that I had simply misunderstood/ Itfuas behind drawn
Cairo
curtains on a hot/afternoon, and a copper tray, with E glasses of lemon
tea, touched our knees as we sat side by side. She wore no veil
physically, but invisibly she had one all over her face, even the eyes.
It had grown into her skin, this inherited veil, muting her face to
an expressionless and passive look of non-commital. But lust played
under the veil, something hungry and squalid. Where her husband found
his pleasure God alone knows. It could hardly have been in her beds What she
wankedl fromme
Nam-thrat/ was crooked sex, e harem slap-and-giggle. With Sophia there
was never a sense of croakedness. You couldn't properly decide that she
was a woman, to start with. Especially in those days (I am talking of
when
twenty years ago), She was a girl, tm so forcefully handsome that
and
tuly
crowds in theatre foyers and concert halls really/d divided, stpped back,
view
to tte her. Her hair was so densely black, her skin so wholesomely
soft, her teeth so fresh, her stride so long and decided, her frown so
deep, her eyes so fiery dark, darting their flames of enquiry everywhere,
that you could be forgiven for thinking her not simply neither man nor
woman, but more of a man than a man and more of a woman than a woman.
You didn't stop to think about your desires or your functions, or any
little physical apparatus, you were simply engulpfed. You could as well
try to stop to analyse the roaring and implacable waveg that sweepsyou
head over heels, = ceel-ds
Buthater I began to think of the crook- hip.
edness involved. Because it was involved. I mean, while surpassing
a man and a woman, she didn't attain either of theme Three or four
lagterwards!
times I lay sweating at her side,) I while she hummed to herself, her
eyes closed, naked but for her girdle, wondering what had happened a
In uur love-moking
few moments before. d
SERE EIE she
resolved none of my desires,
didshe
nor)sivap me anything to replace my empty, closet of unsatisfied dreams
tike rurs
with. I felt that all crookedness must end/in long serene and dusky
conversations, exchanging marvels and mysteries, I2
a it


ended well at all (which must be rare). I could understand why my
queer friends were distraught, srestunse quick to feel a dagger a their
hearts, quick to draw a dagger of their own. there lay the real splend-
But
tresdship
our for myself and Sophiagjin the friendship, That flat word/sounds an
insult to describe all the thrilling daily revelations conveyed by
gestures or a few chance words or a long vigil into the night until first
cock-crow, in a joint exploration that took the bite out of anything
physical. Anyway, as a child I had seen so far into the joys of the
hip.
flesh which marriage could achieve-I mean my mother and father-in
that immense country house where I was born--lapped on all sides by
misty furrowed fields--yes, it was the breath-taking carnal excitement
between them, wild as to seem a madness, a fierce selfvconsuming fire,
that struck me dumb. That fire was only quenched, even then not
completely, towards the end of their lives, andeas could have been
predicted-they died within weeks of each other. The impression on
me was so strong that I feel it robbed me of all chance of erotic
pleasure myself, asif any thrills of mine could only be an imitation,
Yos,
a beggarly mockery. L I know too much of the mysterious intimacies of
markiage to do more than laugh when I hear (from the crooked) that
'straight love' is trite, a routine of progeneration, while in the
crooked lies the throb of the forbidden. Even Sophia subscribes, of
course for 'political' reasons, EERITITE HIE to this rubbish.
The forbadden is at the heart of all lovel But between a man and woman
in marriage it echoes back and forth in the blood, it stretches M
back to ancestors and to animal roots, and every gland, duct, nerve
is awakened to a marvelling primeval attaention which man with man
and woman with woman cannot hope to know. I have never believed in
'ambidextrous' people. How do "both*? The one is so all-engulfing
that you E could never pass to anything lesser! How gp from
those deeply reverberating discoveries of the real biological encounter


to one mixed ambiguously with friendship and, worse, ennityl I have
never said this kind of thing to Sophia because she would roar me down.
perkaps
Gne-emabe EUEAN Her whole psychological life depends/an' the conviction
that between male and female there is never more than a quick animal
encounter, as limitedly physical as a good sneeze. She could never bring
herself to face the fact that nothing she has given women has so much as
approached the Awild satisfactions they derive from their mene She anly
likes straight womene And all her thoughts on the subject are built
on the assumption that she supplies these women with what no man can give.
Partly this is true. But what she gives is not in the nature of the
physical at all. But her belief that it is physical makes it possible
her
for her to give it. Let me explain. In the course of thuss first
wilh women
tumblesk so hot and noisy and chaotic, so unlike the wildly systematic
crescendos of the successful marriage bed, she gives a hint of the
intangible adventuref. the 'friendship', that lisyahead. But it has
nothing to do with the primordial organs that happen to become involved:
these, bewildered and out of countenance, oblige with their climax, but
9 kem.
they do not relish mare than three or fourX In the end she murmurs in
rather a sad voice that, you know, I had better not go too deep, my
darling, because then I shall never 'come out' again, we shall be in-
separable for life, and after all we do have our lives to leade Then
begins the real thing, and the former bed-riots are hardly mentioned
again. I believe that this is the story more or less with all of us-
I mean all the Sophian women. One or two go on tasting the supposed
delights, but they are usually the ones whose lives are in such a dis-
temper that they dare not try to share them with a man, apart from the
fact that no man will have them. Even then, she quarrels so violently
with them that she has to take a convalescence after they have stayed
with ub. She sees, I think, that Iwatch over her with capable under-
standing, while the others come to her blinded with desires (most of


them, admittedly, not erotic). This is perhaps why she fikes to
think of me as a hard # drinker. There is no ahance, while my eyes
blaze with melted dreams, and my flesh pickles comfortably, that I shall
reveal my understanding of her, and cause her brilliant rituals to be
dissolved.
This is why I went to one of my ex-neighbours from the sailor-boy
days and sat drinkless with her, chatting about old times, on her tereace
overlooking the sea from a perilois height, until dusk came, and then
I slowly hobbled downhill towards the hospital, and uphill between
cypresses home. I arrived suitably out of breath, and began my
familiar roll of the hips when I heard her coming. Except that she
wasn't coming. I forgot we had a vsitor. The french windows had
been opened to admit the bland, warm sea-air, which I always think of
as the second essential ingredient for the evening whisky after the
rocks have gone in--to inhale and sip, inhale and sip, until you feel
that nature is doing it all for you. I sank into my chair in the
darkness, hot and out of breath, listening to the sound of shifting
furniture upstairs, which I took to be the glad noises of Sophia play-
ing the fool with that dumb ballet-dancer with the button nose. I
hadn't the energy to make myself a drink evene Yet I wanted one so
deeply. I don't say I needed onee I just wanted that accompaniment
to the evening dream--the smell, the bite of the rocks on my lips,
the clink of the rocks against the glass as I tipped it back, all
quite as important as the liquid itself. Oh how I have yearned to
turn life into a dreami But it is only partially sol I don't mean,
to turn it into what it is not, to make it unsubstantial. No, I need
all its substantiality! But if only there were someone to take my
bath for me in the morning, get up for me and taste the first air,
someone to sip my first coffeel I mean, it isn't servants I want only,


but ministering
like those provided by Titania, little Ariels
M to transpose the substantial into spirit and back again, so that
I remain a marvelling spectator. Every move I make reminds me of its
own death, now. I so much want to bvaiege life-only the Greeks
could have spoken such a desire-to render it all a vibrantly living
dream.
Sophia came tumbling down the stairs-on an impulse, I could hear
that. To fetch a drink or a - cigar, probably. She gasped with
surprise when she felt my vibrations in the room-this always precedes
her actually seeing someone. There was no sound from upstairs.
Pamela? Oh, she's gone to town to buy (splendidly in character, I
thought) a some cooler knickers. I turned to look at her in the half
darkness. She was tussled and dirty. I've been getting the guest-
room ready for Mother spperior, she saide The Mother Superior?
Yes, she said, she came here. But surely-? Oh, Sophia said,
going with a characteristic decisiveness to the french windows and
standing at the edge of the terrace with her feet wide astride, her hands
on her hips as if challenging someone out there, I think she might be
coming to stay.
I took a quiet bath as usual, in the dawn-dusk I love so much,
careful as always not to disturb my wife who, God knows, needs an extra
hour in the morning to rest from all her cares, and the loss of three
ance-healthy sonse I like to peep through the shutters at the lawn
outside, to see how the dawn progresses: the shadows grow into oleander
bushes and a fountain in Portuguese marble and into lemon-trees in
pots amthenses and laurel, bougainvillea, jasmine, clinging wisteria,
and great boulders which I allowed to remain when we started building,
all of it growing into the morning like creatures stretching and blinking
awake, as I too yawn and rub myself down and unscrew the eau de cologne, Prottle,


And then the colours follow these graceful forms, filling them in
royal red and pink and yellow in the oleanders, and the deep brown
grearor the cypresses against blue-green jasmine leaves, and drops of
yellow lemon blossom and the flashing red of geranium, while the blue
of the sky deepens as if the earth's darkness were being sucked ypwards,
to rest in the sun until needed again at the end of the day. I
breathe in great mouthfuls of airs opening tirst the stindow and then
the shutters. I ought to be satisfied. But I never know how the
day will shape. A heavy mist or scirroco can throw me into depression.
Of course weather cannot do that for long-the blazing sun burns the
depression out somehow, but only while it blazes. This morning I took
a walk, leaving my silver-knobbed cane leaning against a chair as if I
were another persone And indeed this was the terrible theme of my
walke I walked towards the harbour with my hands in my pockets.
And it was as if someone else was putting his hands in my pockets for me.
But nos not even 'for me'. He was putting his hands in his pockets,
and I was not being obliged or accounted for in any way. Many times
this has happened in my life, as if other creatures were playing with
my flesha I feel my mouth form exactly the rather pursed smile of
someone else, but it is someone else I have never knownl Or it might
be a sudden quick yet rolling stride. It can be a tone of voice
a sharpness or even a tenderness- which I cannot recognise as my OWne
It produces a strange itching effect on my body as if my birth had
not been quift complete and the embryo had not decided fully or in
perfect detail what it wanted to be. At other times it seems that
strangers are edging each other to inhabit my flesh. Frequently
I feel I do not own myself. My hand in my pocket actually feels the
cloth of the pocket in the way someone else, not myself, would feel
its of course I reject utterly all these things with my minde


I deliberately go on with the walk. Reaching the harbour is some
screws
conforts the noise of the Feripy-mropmilimes the cranes and the cries of
the loaders, the cars edging themselves forwards into the bowels of the
ships, remind me of the other times when, reaching this same spot, I
have watched these same things and recovered from similar 'visitations',
When I look at other people I feel they cannot know these silent
Rave
convulsions of the self. They walk along so steadily, a their intentions
written plainly in their eyes as they hurry to the duck or the market,
or open their car-doors with an abstracted air, gazing round, before man-
oeuvering themselves into the seat. I let all this stirring normality
soak into me. It really is only a matter of waiting, and of forcing
myself to see everything as it is: I mean, myself at the harbour,
expecting a telegram from the office which will reorientate me nicely
the moment I step back into the house, and the lunch table as it will
be set out, and the intriguing herbal smells coming from the kitchen,
and the sound of hoeing from the garden. And the telephone will ring.
The day will again slip into place. But-ohl-let my body return to
mel Let it not be Rungakkan foreign flesh as it is now, inside a suit
of my choosing and a shirt Aft remember buying, but how strange it seems
in this moment to have bought things for this bodyl And whet connect-
9 todly deserta me?
ion, please, do I have with' tne future) how have I propagated myself?
in three quivering old men who at best will be placid spectators of
life, at worsk murderers and lunatics! I wonder how far this corrupt-
ion of my seed has to do with the severing of my body from my mindl
Or did I make the corruption-dust because I was not a whole man to
start with? Did I force my children bit by bit to give up their
bodies too-and they did it in the only way they knew, by blinding
their senses and their sanityl For, like all men who have given
them
each child his portion, and assured/the best upbringing by all the
accepted public canons of schooling and social hobnobbing, I feel


numbed with guilt that I have only visited my ills on them, because,
you know, children look at what you are, not what you dol I dare not
repeat this to anyone, even to myself. The mellow richness of the
island seems to mock me, so silent, so stilll It seems to say, You
bring your hell even here? But I reserve it for herel In New York
or Amsterdam the Aeruffiownoisoo, the rush of appointments and the
indigestion and the hour-long telephone conversations squeeze it down
to a fierce burning point at the centre of my heart!
Does his egotism really go so far that he thinks of his children
as bits of his destiny and not their own, and as ciphers in his moulding
hands? The young are implacable! They strike and destroy with un
cold
regretting hearti They hate with ferocity that surprises them in
later years! They choose their parents with their own life-objectives
in view-of murder or thought or labour! Yes, we choose to whom we
shall be born! And then we pursue our destinyl We make gods or devils
of older people because we have those gods and devils inside ourselves.
Parenthood, home, background have nothing to do with itt These are
nothing but jpthe chosen Er décor. We tear the décor down, we build
it up, we modify it, we fly from it-whichaver serves our purpose best!
Our destiny sweeps us forward and vird-vis this destiny the mother and
father and sister and brother have only a serving role! The young are
the movers! They snatch at the çarrion or the gold-they invent nothing-
they bring nothing by way of material-their revolutions end originalit-
ies are always those of the long-since dead or the no-longer young!
What they do bring is their sweeping and implacable destiny, even if it
is towards suicidel Left to themselves they would burn life to the
ground, each in his way--one to the buildings and the streets, another
to the patient earth, another to the feelings, another to the thoughts,
swallowing themselves up too fast in their destinies! But they can
only use what they find, as hens can only peck what awaits them on the


ground, and it is this that modifies them.
Little does he know that he gave birth to 'three old men* as he
calls them, and that, so far from having formed them, it is they who
bring deep influences to bear on him, so that-didn't you just hear?
he begins to genuinely think for the first time in his lifel So he
chose them, as well as they choosing him! For we are all working!
Destiny on destinyl He himself, beginning to grow old, is working
towards his future selves. This is why he feels he doesn't own his
body (who does?): This is why he feels another creature stretching
his hand into his pocket, and his own face smiling with a stranger's
smilel He is trying out other costumes, other skins, he is rehearsing
for the future with all the apparatus of previous births-his real
ancestors, not those bespoke ones of the family! The family is of all
illusions the most bitterly illusive! I am shrieking with firmamental
laughter!
Who spoke?