The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [103]
There remained only one thing to do now, to see Nessim. I was relieved to learn that he was due to come into town that evening. Here again time had another surprise in store for me for the Nessim who lived in my memories had changed.
He had aged like a woman — his lips and face had both broadened. He walked now with his weight distributed comfort-ably on the flat of his feet as if his body had already submitted to a dozen pregnancies. The queer litheness of his step had gone. More-over he radiated now a flabby charm mixed with concern which made him at first all but unrecognizable. A foolish authoritative-ness had replaced the delightful old diffidence. He was just back from Kenya.
I had hardly time to capture and examine these new impressions when he suggested that we should visit the Etoile together — the night-club where Melissa used to dance. It had changed hands, he added, as if this somehow excused our visiting it on the very day of her funeral. Shocked and surprised as I was I agreed without hesitation, prompted both by curiosity as to his own feelings and a desire to discuss the transaction which concerned the child — this mythical child.
When we walked down the narrow airless stairway into the white light of the place a cry went up and the girls came running to him from every corner like cockroaches. It appeared that he was well known now as an habitué. He opened his arms to them with a shout of laughter, turning to me for approval as he did so. Then taking their hands one after another he pressed them voluptuously to the breast pocket of his coat so that they might feel the outlines of the thick wallet he now carried, stuffed with banknotes. This gesture at once reminded me of how, when I was accosted one night in the dark streets of the city by a pregnant woman and trying to make my escape, she took my hand, as if to give me an idea of the pleasure she was offering (or perhaps to emphasize her need) and pressed it upon her swollen abdomen. Now, watching Nessim, I suddenly recalled the tremulous beat of the foetal heart in the eighth month.
It is difficult to describe how unspeakably strange I found it to sit beside this vulgar double of the Nessim I had once known. I studied him keenly but he avoided my eye and confined his con-versation to laboured commonplaces which he punctuated by
yawns that were one by one tapped away behind ringed fingers. Here and there, however, behind this new façade stirred a hint of the old diffidence, but buried — as a fine physique may be buried in a mountain of fat. In the washroom Zoltan the waiter confided in me: ‘He has become truly himself since his wife went away. All Alexandria says so.’ The truth was that he had become like all Alexandr ia.
Late that night the whim seized him to drive me to Montaza in the late moonlight; we sat in the car for a long time in silence, smoking, gazing out at the moonlit waves hobbling across the sand bar. It was during this silence that I apprehended the truth about him. He had not really changed inside. He had merely adopted a new mask.
* * * * *
In the early summer I received a long letter from Clea with which this brief introductory memorial to Alexandria may well be brought to a close.
‘You may perhaps be interested in my account of a brief meeting with Justine a few weeks ago. We had, as you know, been exchang-ing occasional cards from our respective countries for some time past, and hearing that I was due to pass through Palestine into Syria she herself suggested a brief meeting. She would come, she said, to the border station where the Haifa train waits for half an hour. The settlement in which she works is somewhere near at hand, she could get a lift. We might talk for a while on the platform. To this I agreed.
‘At first I had some difficulty in recognizing her. She has gone a good deal fatter in the face and has chopped off her hair carelessly at the back so that it sticks out in rats’ tails. I gather that for the most part she wears it done up in a cloth. No trace remains of the old elegance or chic. Her features seem to have broadened, become more classically Jewish, lip and nose inclining more towards each other. I was shocked at first by the glittering eyes and the quick incisive way of breathing and talking