The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [336]
— dark glasses, worn indoors, in winter! There was a pair of them in the top drawer of the writing desk.
He drove the car slowly down to the little square by Ramleh Station, quite absurdly pleased by his fancy dress, and eased it neatly into the car park by the Cecil Hotel; then he locked it and walked quietly off with the air of someone abandoning a lifetime’s habit — walked with a new and quite delightful feeling of self-possession towards the Arab quarters of the town where he might find the dinner he sought. As he skirted the Corniche he had one moment of unpleasant fear and doubt — for he saw a familiar figure cross the road further down and walk towards him along the sea-wall. It was impossible to mistake Balthazar’s characteris-tic prowling walk; Mountolive was overcome with a sheepish sense of shame, but he held his course. To his delight, Balthazar glanced once at him and looked away without recognizing his friend. They passed each other in a flash, and Mountolive expelled his breath loudly with relief; it was really odd the anonymity conferred by this ubiquitous red flower-pot of a hat, which so much altered the outlines of the human face. And the dark glasses!
He chuckled quietly as he turned away from the sea-front, choosing the tangle of little lanes which might lead him towards the Arab bazaars and the eating houses round the commercial port. Hereabouts it would be a hundred to one that he would ever be recognized — for few Europeans ever came into this part of the city. The quarter lying beyond the red lantern belt, populated by the small traders, money-lenders, coffee-speculators, ships’
chandlers, smugglers; here in the open street one had the illusion of time spread out flat — so to speak — like the skin of an ox; the
map of time which one could read from one end to the other, filling it in with known points of reference. This world of Moslem time stretched back to Othello and beyond — cafés sweet with trilling of singing birds whose cages were full of mirrors to give them the illusion of company. The love-songs of birds to com-panions they imagined — which were only reflections of them-selves! How heartbreakingly they sang, these illustrations of human love! Here too in the ghastly breath of the naphtha flares the old eunuchs sat at trictrac, smoking the long narguilehs which at every drawn breath loosed a musical bubble of sound like a dove’s sob; the walls of the old cafés were stained by the sweat from the tarbushes hanging on the pegs; their collections of coloured narguilehs were laid up in rows in a long rack, like muskets, for which each tobacco-drinker brought his cherished personal holder. Here too the diviners, cartomancers — or those who would deftly fill your palm with ink and for half a piastre scry the secrets of your inmost life. Here the pedlars carried magic loads of variegated and dissimilar objects of vertu from the thistle-soft carpets of Shiraz and Baluchistan to the playing cards of the Marseilles Tarot; incense of the Hejaz, green beads against the evil eye, combs, seeds, mirrors for birdcages, spices, amulets and paper fans … the list was endless; and each, of course, carried in his private wallet — like a medieval pardoner — the fruit of the world’s great pornographies in the form of handkerchiefs and post-cards on which were depicted, in every one of its pitiful variations, the one act we human beings most dream of and fear. Mysterious, underground, the ever-flowing river of sex, trickling easily through the feeble dams set up by our fretful legislation and the typical self-reproaches of the unpleasure-lov ing … the broad underground river flowing from Petronius to Frank Harris. (The drift and overlap of ideas in Mountolive’s fuddled mind, rising and disappearing in pretty half-formulated figures, iridescent as soap-bubbles.) He was perfectly at his ease, now; he had come to terms with his unfamiliar state of befuddlement and no longer felt that he was drunk; it was simply that he had become inflated now by a sense of tremendous dignity and self-importance which gave him a grandiose deliberation of movement. He walked slowly, like a pregnant woman nearing term, drinking in the sights and sounds.