The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [102]
‘A coolness has sprung up between Nessim and myself. When Melissa came back he refused to see her out of a sort of disgust which I found inhuman, hard to comprehend. I don’t know…. As for the child he is trying to get it adopted. He has come almost to hate it, I suppose. He thinks Justine will never come back to him so long as he has Melissa’s child. For my part’ he added more slowly ‘I look at it this way: by one of those fearful displacements of which only love seems capable the child Justine lost was given back by Nessim not to her but to Melissa. Do you see?’
The sense of ghostly familiarity which was growing upon me now was due to the fact that we were approaching the little room in which I had visited Cohen when he was dying. Of course Melissa must be lying in the same narrow iron bed in the corner by the wall. It would be just like real life to imitate art at this point. There were some nurses in the room busy whispering round the bed, arranging screens; but at a word from Balthazar they scattered and disappeared. We stood arm in arm in the doorway for a moment looking in. Melissa looked pale and somehow wizened. They had bound up her jaw with tape and closed the eyes so that she looked as if she had fallen asleep during a beauty treatment. I was glad her eyes were closed; I had been dreading their glance.
I was left alone with her for a while in the huge silence of that whitewashed ward and all of a sudden I found myself suffering from acute embarrassment. It is hard to know how to behave with the dead; their enormous deafness and rigidity is so studied. One becomes awkward as if in the presence of royalty. I coughed behind my hand and walked up and down the ward stealing little glances at her out of the corner of my eye, remembering the confusion which had once beset me when she called upon me with a gift of
flowers. I would have liked to slip Cohen’s rings on her fingers but they had already swathed her body in bandages and her arms were bound stiffly to her sides. In this climate bodies decompose so quickly that they have to be almost unceremoniously rushed to the grave. I said ‘Melissa’ twice in an uncertain whisper bending my lips to her ear. Then I lit a cigarette and sat down beside her on a chair to make a long study of her face, comparing it to all the other faces of Melissa which thronged my memory and had established their identity there. She bore no resemblance to any of them —
and yet she set them off, concluded them. This white little face was the last term of a series. Beyond this point there was a locked door. At such times one gropes about for a gesture which will match the terrible marble repose of the will which one reads on the faces of the dead. There is nothing in the whole ragbag of human emotions. ‘Terrible are the four faces of love,’ wrote Arnauti in another context. I mentally told the figure on the bed that I would take the child if Nessim would part with her, and this silent agree-ment made I kissed the high pale forehead once and left her to the ministrations of those who would parcel her up for the grave. I was glad to leave the room, to leave a silence so elaborate and for-bidding. I suppose we writers are cruel people. The dead do not care. It is the living who might be spared if we could quarry the message which lies buried in the heart of all human experience. (‘In the old days the sailing ships in need of ballast would collect tortoises from the mainland and fill great barrels with them, alive. Those that survived the terrible journey might be sold as pets for children. The putrefying bodies of the rest were emptied into the East India Docks. There were plenty more where they came from.’)
I walked lightly effortlessly about the town like an escaped prisoner. Mnemjian had violet tears in his violet eyes as he em-braced me warmly. He settled down to shave me himself, his every gesture expressing an emollient sympathy and tenderness. Outside on the pavements drenched with sunlight walked the citizens of Alexandr ia each locked into a world of personal relationships and fears, yet each seeming to my eyes infinitely remote from those upon which my own thoughts and feelings were busy. The city was smiling with a heartbreaking indifference, a cocotte refreshed by the darkness.