The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [280]
But his good humour returned when he reached the little Greek oyster-tavern by the sea whose walls were lined with butts and barrels of all sizes, and from whose kitchens came great gusts of smoke and smell of whitebait and octopus frying in olive oil. Here he sat, among the ragged boatmen and schooner-crews of the Levant, to eat his oysters and dip into the newspaper, while the evening began to compose itself comfortably around him, un-troubled by thought or the demands of conversation with its wicked quotidian platitudes. Later he might be able to relate his ideas once more to the book which he was trying to complete so slowly, painfully, in these hard-won secret moments stolen from an empty professional life, stolen even from the circumstances which he built around himself by virtue of laziness, of gregar-iousness. (‘Care for a drink?’ — ‘Don’t mind if I do.’ How many evenings had been lost like this?)
And the newspapers? He dwelt mostly upon the Faits Divers
— those little oddities of human conduct which mirrored the true estate of man, which lived on behind the wordier abstractions, pleading for the comic and miraculous in lives made insensitive by drabness, by the authority of bald reason. Beside a banner headline which he would have to interpret in a draft despatch for Mountolive the next day — ARAB UNION APPEALS AGAIN — he could find the
enduring human frailties in GREAT RELIGIOUS LEADER TRAPPED IN
LIFT or LUNATIC BREAKS MONTE CARLO BANK which reflected the macabre unreason of fate and circumstance.
Later, under the influence of the excellent food at the Coin de France he began to smoke his evening more enjoyably still — like a pipe of opium. The inner world with its tensions unwound its spools inside him, flowing out and away in lines of thought which flickered intermittently into his consciousness like morse. As if he had become a real receiving apparatus — these rare moments of good dictation!
At ten he noted on the back of a letter from his bank a few of the gnomic phrases which belonged to his book. As ‘Ten. No attacks by the hippogriff this week. Some speeches for Old Parr?’
And then, below it, disjointedly, words which, condensing now in the mind like dew, might later be polished and refashioned into the armature of his characters’ acts.
( a) With every advance from the known to the unknown, the mystery increases.
( b) Here I am, walking about on two legs with a name — the whole intellectual history of Europe from Rabelais to de Sade.
( c) Man will be happy when his Gods perfect themselves.
( d) Even the Saint dies with all his imperfections on his head.
( e) Such a one as might be above divine reproach, beneath human contempt.
( f) Possession of a human heart — disease without remedy. ( g) All great books are excursions into pity. ( h) The yellow millet dream is everyman’s way. Later these oracular thoughts would be all brushed softly into the character of Old Parr, the sensualist Tiresias of his novel, though erupting thus, at haphazard, they offered no clue as to the order in which they would really be placed fina lly.
He yawned. He was pleasantly tipsy after his second Armagnac. Outside the grey awnings, the city had once more assumed the true pigmentation of night. Black faces now melted into blackness; one saw apparently empty garments walking about, as in The Invisible Man. Red pill-boxes mounted upon cancelled faces, the darkness of darkness. Whistling softly, he paid his bill and walked lightly down to the Corniche again to where, at the end of a narrow
street, the green bubble of the Etoile flared and beckoned; he dived into the narrow bottleneck staircase to emerge into an airless ballroom, half blinded now by the incandescent butcher’s light and pausing only to let Zoltan take his mackintosh away to the cloakroom. For once he was not irked by the fear of his unpaid drink-chits