The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [23]
After I had dressed and managed to borrow some money from Pursewarden — while I was on my way to post a letter — I saw Melissa again sitting in the corner of a coffee shop, alone, with her hands supporting her chin. Her hat and handbag lay beside her and she was staring into her cup with a wry reflective air of amusement. Impulsively I entered the place and sat down beside her. I had come, I said, to apologize for receiving her so badly, but … and I began to describe the circumstances which had preoccupied me, leaving nothing out. The broken electric-ring, the absence of Hamid, my summer-suit. As I began to enumerate the evils by which I was beset they began to seem to me slightly funny, and altering my angle of approach I began to recount them with a lugubrious exasperation which coa xed from her one of the most delightful laughs I have ever heard. On the subject of my debts I frankly exaggerated, though it was certainly a fact that since the night of the affray Pursewarden was always ready to lend me small sums of money without hesitation. And then to cap it all, I said, she had appeared while I was still barely cured of a minor but irritating venereal infection — the fruit of Pombal’s solicitude —
contracted no doubt from one of the Syrians he had thoughtfully left behind him. This was a he but I felt impelled to relate it in spite of myself. I had been horrified I said at the thought of having to make love again before I was quite well. At this she put out her hand and placed it on mine while she laughed, wrinkling up her
nose: laughing with such candour, so lightly and effortlessly, that there and then I decided to love her.
We idled arm in arm by the sea that afternoon, our conversations full of the debris of lives lived without forethought, without archi-tecture. We had not a taste in common. Our characters and pre-dispositions were wholly different, and yet in the magical ease of this friendship we felt something promised us. I like, also, to re-member that first kiss by the sea, the wind blowing up a flake of hair at each white temple — a kiss broken off by the laughter which beset her as she remembered my account of the trials I was en-during. It symbolized the passion we enjoyed, its humour and lack of intenseness: its charity.
* * * * *
Two subjects upon which it was fruitless to question Justine too closely: her age, her origins. Nobody — possibly not even, I believe, Nessim himself — knew all about her with any certainty. Even the city’s oracle Mnemjian seemed for once at loss, though he was knowledgeable about her recent love affairs. Yet the violet eyes narrowed as he spoke of her and hesitantly he volunteered the information that she came from the dense Attarine Quarter, and had been born of a poor Jewish family which had since emigrated to Salonika. The diaries are not very helpful either since they lack clues — names, dates, places — and consist for the most part of wild flights of fancy punctuated by bitter little anecdotes and sharp line-drawings of people whose identity is masked by a letter of the alphabet. The French she writes in is not very correct, but spirited and highly-flavoured; and carries the matchless quality of that husky speaking-voice. Look: ‘Clea speaking of her childhood: thinking of mine, passionately thinking. The childhood of my race, my time…. Blows first in the hovel behind the Stadium; the clock-mender’s shop. I see myself now caught in the passionate concentration of watching a love r’s sleeping face as I so often saw him bent over a broken timepiece with the harsh light pouring down noiselessly over him. Blows and curses, and printed every-where on the red mud walls (like the blows struck by conscience) the imprint of blue hands, fingers outstretched, that guarded us against the evil eye. With these blows we grew up, aching heads,