The Black Book Read Online Free Page B

away.” Boisterously he yells, “Get to fucking hell out of here and lemme be, will yer?”
    The world is laid out before the fire like a chessboard on which we plan the most exciting moves. It is only a game. Tarquin is running barefooted on the scorched Cretan rocks, while the darkeyed shepherd is allowing himself to be overtaken, to be gathered up, covered in kisses. Instead of his gaunt stringy body he should really have a fine lithe trunk. And a sheepskin. Not to mention a flute. “You will not mock me,” he says seriously, “because I can see in your face that you believe in love. In dying for love.” He holds a spatulate finger between us, which we contemplate, as if expecting it to die there, visibly, in the air. “Now Gregory could never see my point of view at all. It was too strong and positive for him, I think.” In silence we are gulping the cold snow, the hot tea, the hotel, the geysers, the stricken pines, the statues, the yellow goat’s eyes. And I am pondering on Gregory and Grace and the curious design he made of them both in the little green handwriting. Gregory is a sort of chessman, like a green bishop, entangled in his pawn, and writing with the quiet venom of a player who has forgotten the rules. The book which is my secret, in the cupboard downstairs.
    â€œThe presence of oneself!” That is how he begins. “The eternal consciousness of oneself in substance and in psyche. The eternal consciousness of that shadow which hangs behind my shoulder, watching me flourish my ink on this nude paper. What a recipe for immortality! The one self and the other, like twin generals divided in policy, bungling a war. The eternal, abhorrent presence of oneself.” Small green writing, like lacework on the tough pages of the black dummy. Who Gregory was I have not properly discovered yet. This tiny basement room was evidently his. At some epoch in history he vanished, leaving behind him a few gross of torn papers, Latin classics, gramophone records, teacups. On the title-page of this book, undated, is the inscription: Death Gregory, Esq. To his most esteemed and best beloved self, dat dedicatque. Oblivion has swallowed up this chance eviction, and there remains only the queer speckled personality of this tome, so durable and recent in age (for Tarquin and Clare and Lobo exist here) that it suggests recent visitations. “I cannot be older than a thousand years. I am not speaking of my isolation as yet, which is six by three. The isolation of a coffin. The isolation of a gargoyle hung over a sleeping city.”
    The isolation of the snow, he would have added, if he were turning the pages today. The isolation in which the hotel broods, like a baroque incubus.

    Here begins an extract from Gregory’s diary:
    The question with which I trouble myself is the question of the ego, the little me. The I, sitting here in this fuggy room, like a little red-haired, skullcapped Pope, insulting myself in green ink. The red dwarf, the lutin, the troll—the droll and abhorrent self!
    Sweets to the sweet. To Lobo sensual lust. And for the journalist inevitably, a journal. A journal! What a delicious excursion it sounds! The path lies ready, the fruit grows on the hedgesides. But the stupendous arrogance of such a record! What should it contain, then? A pedestrian reckoning by the sun, or aphoristic flights, or a momentous study of my excretions covering years? A digest of all three, perhaps. One can hardly tell. No matter. Let us begin with Lobo. To insects sensual lust. And to Lobo a victory over the female, because that is what he wants. I say victory but I mean a rout: a real beating up of his natural enemy, who degrades him by the fact that she carries the puissant, the all-conquering talisman of the vagina about with her. If it were possible to invent a detached vagina, which has an effective life of its own, then Lobo would be a profound misogynist, I am sure.
    But