The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [125]
Justine at this time … coming from nowhere, she had per-formed one trick regarded as clever by the provincials of Alexan-dria. She had married Arnauti, a foreigner, only to earn the con-tempt of society by letting him in the end divorce and abandon her. Of the fate of the child, few people knew or cared. She was not ‘in
society’ as the saying goes…. For a time poverty forced her to do a little modelling at so many piastres an hour for the art-students of the Atelier. Clea, who knew her only by hearsay, passed through the long gallery one day when she was posing and, struck by the dark Alexandrian beauty of her face, engaged her for a portrait. That was how those long conversations grew up in the silences of the painter; for Clea liked her subjects to talk freely, provided they stayed still. It gave a submarine life to their features, and filled their looks with unconscious interpretations of thought — the true beauty in otherwise dead flesh.
Clea’s generous innocence — it needed something like that to see the emptiness in which Justine lived with her particular sor-rows — factual illustrations merely of a mind at odds with itself: for we create our own misfortunes and they bear our own finger-prints. The gesture itself was simply a clumsy attempt to appro-priate the mystery of true experience, true suffering — as by touching a holy man the supplicant hopes for a transference of the grace he lacks. The kiss did not for a moment expect itself to be answered by another — to copy itself like the reflections of a moth in a look ing-glass. That would have been too expensive a gesture had it been premeditated. So it proved! Clea’s own body simply struggled to disengage itself from the wrappings of its innocence as a baby or a statue struggles for life under the fingers or forceps of its author. Her bankruptcy was one of extreme youth, Justine’s ageless; her innocence was as defenceless as memory itself. Seeking and admiring only the composure of Justine’s sorrow she found herself left with all the bitter lye of an uninvited love. She was ‘white of heart’, in the expressive Arabic phrase, and painting the darkness of Justine’s head and shoulders she suddenly felt as if, stroke by stroke, the brush itself had begun to imitate caresses she had neither foreseen nor even thought to permit. As she listened to that strong deep voice recounting these misfortunes, so desirable in that they belonged to the active living world of experience, she caught her breath between her teeth, trying now to think only of the unconscious signs of good breeding in her subject: hands still in the lap, voice low, the reserve which deline-ates true power. Yet even she, from her inexperience, could do little but pity Justine when she said things like ‘I am not much good, you know. I can only inflict sadness, Arnauti used to say. He
brought me to my senses and taught me that nothing matters except pleasure — which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect.’ Clea was touched by this because it seemed clear to her that Justine had never really experienced pleasure — one has to be generous for that. Egotism is a fortress in which the conscience de soi-même, like a corrosive, eats away everything. True pleasure is in giving, surely.
‘As for Arnauti, he nearly drove me mad with his inquisitions. What I lost as a wife I gained as a patient — his interest in what he called “my case” outweighed any love he might have had for me. And then losing the child made me hate him where before I had only seen a rather sensitive and kindly man. You have probably read his book Moeurs. Much of it is invented — mostly to satisfy his own vanity and get his own back on me for the way I wounded his pride in refusing to be “cured” — so-called. You can