The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [36]
We slept, and I was only woken by the dry click of Hamid’s key turning in the lock and by his usual evening performance. For a pious man, whose little prayer mat lay rolled and ready to hand on the kitchen balcony, he was extraordinarily superstitious. He was as Pombal said, ‘djinn-ridden’, and there seemed to be a djinn in every corner of the flat. How tired I had become of hearing his muttered ‘ Destoor, destoor’, as he poured slops down the kitchen sink — for here dwelt a powerful djinn and its pardon had to be in-voked. The bathroom too was haunted by them, and I could always tell when Hamid used the outside lavatory (which he had been forbidden to do) because whenever he sat on the water-closet a hoarse involuntary invocation escaped his lips (‘Permission O ye blessed ones!’) which neutralized the djinn which might otherwise have dragged him down into the sewage system. Now I heard him shuffling round the kitchen in his old felt slippers like a boa-constrictor muttering softly. I woke Justine from a troubled doze and explored her mouth and eyes and fine hair with the anguished curiosity which for me has always been the largest part of sensuality. ‘We must be going’
I said. ‘Pombal will be coming back from the Consulate in a little while.’
I recall the furtive languor with which we dressed and silent as accomplices made our way down the gloomy staircase into the street. We did not dare to link arms, but our hands kept meeting involuntarily as we walked, as if they had not shaken off the spell of the afternoon and could not bear to be separated. We parted speechlessly too, in the little square with its dying trees burnt to
the colour of coffee by the sun; parted with only one look — as if we wished to take up emplacements in each other’s mind forever. It was as if the whole city had crashed about my ears; I walked about in it aimlessly as survivors must walk about the streets of their native city after an earthquake, amazed to find how much that had been familiar was changed. I felt in some curious way deafened and remember nothing more except that much later I ran into Pursewarden and Pombal in a bar, and that the former recited some lines from the old poet’s famous ‘The City’ which struck me with a new force — as if the poetry had been newly minted: though I knew them well. And when Pombal said: ‘You are ab-stracted this evening. What is the matter?’ I felt like answering him in the words of the dying Amr:* ‘I feel as if heaven lay close upon the earth and I between them both, breathing through the eye of a needle.’
PART II
o have written so much and to have said nothing about Balthazar is indeed an omission — for in a sense he is one T of the keys to the City. The key: Yes, I took him very much as he was in those days and now in my memory I feel that he is in need of a new evaluation. There was much that I did not understand then, much that I have since learned. I remember chiefly those interminable evenings spent at the Café Al Aktar. playing backgammon while he smoked his favourite Lakadif in a pipe with a lon g stem. If Mnemjian is the archives of the City, Balthazar is its Platonic daimon — the mediator between its Gods and its men. It sounds far-fetched, I know.
I see a tall man in a black hat with a narrow brim. Pombal christened him ‘the botanical goat’. He is thin, stoops slightly, and has a deep croaking voice of great beauty, particularly when he quotes or recites. In speaking to you he never looks at you directly
— a trait which I have noticed in many homosexuals. But in him this does not signify inversion, of which he is not only not ashamed, but to which he is actually ind ifferent; his yellow goat-eyes are those of a hypnotist. In not looking at you he is sparing you from a regard so pitiless that it would discountenance you for an even-ing. It is a mystery how he can have, suspended from his trunk, hands of such monstrous ugliness. I would long since have cut them off and thrown them into the sea. Under his chin he has one dark spur of hair growing, such as one sometimes sees upon the hoof of a sculptured Pan.