The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [25]
Heaving his bulk round he next produced from his pocket a battered little yellow-covered novelette and placed it on my knees.
‘Here is something to interest you. Justine was married when she was very young to a French national, Albanian by descent, a
writer. This little book is about her — a post-mortem on her; it is quite decently done.’ I turned the novel over in my hands. It was entitled Moeurs and it was by a certain Jacob Arnauti. The flyleaf showed it to have enjoyed numerous reprintings in the early thirties. ‘How do you know this?’ I asked, and Georges winked a large, heavy-lidded reptilian eye as he replied. ‘We have been making enquiries. The Consul can think of nothing but Justine, and the whole staff has been busy for weeks collecting information about her. Vive la France! ’
When he had gone I started turning the pages of Moeurs, still half-dazed by sleep. It was very well written indeed, in the first person singular, and was a diary of Alexandrian life as seen by a foreigner in the early thirties. The author of the diary is engaged on research for a novel he proposes to do — and the day to day account of his life in Alexandria is accurate and penetrating; but what arrested me was the portrait of a young Jewess he meets and marries: takes to Europe: divorces. The foundering of this mar-riage on their return to Egypt is done with a savage insight that throws into relief the character of Claudia, his wife. And what astonished and interested me was to see in her a sketch of Justine I recognized without knowing: a younger, a more disoriented Justine, to be sure. But unmistakable. Indeed whenever I read the book, and this was often, I was in the habit of restoring her name to the text. It fitted with an appalling verisimilitude. They met, where I had first seen her, in the gaunt vestibu le of the Cecil, in a mirror. ‘In the vestibule of this moribund hotel the palms splinter and refract their motionless fronds in the gilt-edged mirrors. Only the rich can afford to stay permanently —
those who live on in the guilt-edged security of a pensionable old age. I am looking for cheaper lodgings. In the lobby tonight a small circle of Syrians, heavy in their dark suits, and yellow in their scarlet tarbushes, solemnly sit. Their hippopotamus-like womenfolk, lightly moustached, have jingled off to bed in their jewellery. The men’s curious soft oval faces and effeminate voices are busy upon jewel-boxes — for each of these brokers carries his choicest jewels with him in a casket; and after dinner the talk has turned to male jewellery. It is all the Mediterranean world has left to talk about; a self-interest, a narcissism which comes from sexual exhaustion expressing itself in the possessive symbol: so that meet-
ing a man you are at once informed what he is worth, and meeting his wife you are told in the same breathless whisper what her dowry was. They croon like eunuchs over the jewels, turning them this way and that in the light to appraise them. They flash their sweet white teeth in little feminine smiles. They sigh. A white-robed waiter with a polished ebony face brings coffee. A silver hinge flies open upon heavy white (like the thighs of Egyptian women) cigarettes each with its few flecks of hashish. A few grains of drunkenness before bedtime. I have been thinking about the girl I met last night in the mirror: dark on marble-ivory white: glossy black hair: deep suspiring eyes in which one’s glances sink because they are nervous, curious, turned to sexual curiosity. She pretends to be a Greek, but she must be Jewish. It takes a Jew to smell out a Jew; and neither of us has the courage to confess our true race. I have told her I am French. Sooner or later we shall find one another out.
‘The women of the foreign communities here are more beautiful than elsewhere. Fear, insecurity dominates them. They have the illusion of foundering in the ocean of blackness all around. This city has been built like a dyke to hold back the flood of African darkness; but the soft-footed blacks have already started leaking into the European quarters: a sort of racial osmosis is going on. To be happy one would have to be a Moslem, an Egyptian woman