The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [321]
‘To say that a man is unscrupulous implies that he was born with inherent scruples which he now chooses to disregard. But does one visualize a man born patently conscienceless? A man born without a common habit of soul? (Memlik).’
Yes, it would be easy if he were legless, armless, blind, to visualize him; but a particular deficit of a glandular secretion, a missing portion of soul, that would make him rather a target for wonder, perhaps even commiseration. (Memlik). There were men whose feelings dispersed in spray — became as fine as if squeezed through an atomizer: those who had frozen them —
‘pins and needles of the heart’; there were others born without a sense of value — the morally colour-blind ones. The very powerful were often like that — men walking ins ide a dream-cloud of their actions which somehow lacked meaning to them. Was this also Memlik? Nessim felt all the passionate curiosity about the man which an entomologist might have for an unclassified specimen. Light a cigarette. Get up and walk about the room, pausing from time to time to read the invitation and laugh again silently. The relief kept displacing anxiety, the anxiety relief. He lifted the telephone and spoke to Justine qu ietly, with a smiling voice:
‘The Mountain has been to Mahomet.’ (Code for Mountolive and Nur.) ‘Yes, my dear. It is a relief to know for certain. All my toxicology and pistol-practice! It looks silly now, I know. This is the way I would have wanted it to happen; but of course, one had to take precautions. Well, pressure is being put upon Mahomet, and he has delivered a small mouse in the form of an invitation to a Wird. ’ He heard her laugh incredulously. ‘Please, my darling’
he said, ‘obtain one of the finest Korans you can get and send it to the office. There are some old ones with ivory covers in the library collection. Yes, I shall take it to Cairo on Wednesday. He
must certainly have his Koran.’ (Memlik.) It was all very well to joke. The respite would only be a temporary one; but at least he need not for the moment fear poison or the stealthy figure lurking in an alley which might have…. No. The situation seemed not without a promise of fruitful de lay.
Today in the sixties the house of Memlik Pasha has become famous in the remotest capitals of the world chiefly because of the distinctive architecture of the Banks which bear their founder’s name; and indeed their style has all the curious marks of this mysterious man’s taste — for they are all built to the same grotesque pattern, a sort of travesty of an Egyptian tomb, adapted by a pupil of Corbusier! Irresistibly one is forced to stop short and wonder at their grim façades, whether one is walking in Rome or Rio. The squat pillars suggest a mammoth stricken by sudden elephantiasis, the grotesque survival, or perhaps revival, of something inherently macabre — a sort of Ottoman-Egyptian-Gothic? For all the world as if Euston Station had multiplied by binary fission! But by now the power of the man has gone out through these strange funnels into the world at large — all that power condensed and deployed from the small inlaid coffee-table upon which (if ever) he wrote, from the tattered yellow divan to which his lethargy held him tethered day by day. (For interviews of particular importance, he wore his tarbush and yellow suede gloves. In his hand he held a common market fly-whisk which his jeweller had embellished with a design in seed-pearls.) He never smiled. A Greek photographer who had once implored him in the name of art to do so had been unceremoniously carted out into the garden under the clicking palms and dealt twelve lashes to atone for his insult.
Perhaps the strange mixture of heredities had something to do with it; for his blood was haunted by an Albanian father and a Nubian mother, whose dreadful quarrels tormented his childhood sleep. He was an only son. This was perhaps how simple ferocity contrived to be matched against an apparent apathy, a whispering voice raised sometimes to a woman’s pitch but employed without the use of gesture. Physically too, the long silky head-hair with its suggestion of kink, the nose and mouth carved flatly in dark Nubian sandstone and set in bas-relief upon a completely round Alpine head