The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [365]
Pombal’s car dropped me at the flat. Forgotten whispers stirred in me as I rang the bell. One-eyed Hamid opened to me, and after a moment of surprise he performed a curious little jump in the air. The original impulse of this jump must have been an embrace which he repressed just in time. But he put two fingers on my wrist and jumped like a solitary penguin on an ice-floe before retreating to give himself room for the more elaborate and formal greeting. ‘Ya Hamid’ I cried, as delighted as he was. We crossed ourselves ceremonially at each other.
The whole place had been transformed once more, repainted and papered and furnished in massive official fashion. Hamid led me gloatingly from room to room while I mentally tried to reconstruct its original appearance from memories which had by now become faded and transposed. It was hard to see Melissa shrieking, for example. On the exact spot now stood a handsome sideboard crowded with bottles. (Pursewarden had once gesti-culated from the far corner.) Bits of old furniture came back to mind. ‘Those old things must be knocking about somewhere’
I thought in quotation from the poet of the city.* The only
recognizable item was Pombal’s old gout-chair which had myster-iously reappeared in its old place under the window. Had he perhaps flown back with it from Rome? That would be like him. The little box-room where Melissa and I…. It was now Hamid’s own room. He slept on the same uncomfortable bed which I looked at with a kind of shrinking feeling, trying to recapture the flavour and ambience of those long enchanted afternoons when…. But the little man was talking. He must prepare lunch. And then he rummaged in a corner and thrust into my hand a crumpled snap-shot which he must at some time have stolen from Melissa. It was a street-photograph and very faded. Melissa and I walked arm in arm talking down Rue Fuad. Her face was half turned away from me, smiling — dividing her attention between what I was saying so earnestly and the lighted shop-windows we passed. It must have been taken, this snapshot, on a winter afternoon around the hour of four. What on earth could I have been telling her with such earnestness? For the life of me I could not recall the time and place; yet there it was, in black and white, as they say. Perhaps the words I was uttering were momentous, significant —
or perhaps they were meaningless! I had a pile of books under my arm and was wearing the dirty old mackintosh which I finally gave to Zoltan. It was in need of a dry-clean. My hair, too, seemed to need cutting at the back. Impossible to restore this vanished afternoon to mind! I gazed carefully at the circumstantial detail of the picture like someone bent upon restoring an irremediably faded fresco. Yes, it was winter, at four o’clock. She was wearing her tatty sealskin and carried a handbag which I had not ever seen in her possession. ‘Sometime in August — was it August?’ I men-tally quoted to myself again.*
Turning back to the wretched rack-like bed again I whispered her name softly. With surprise and chagrin I discovered that she had utterly vanished. The waters had simply closed over her head. It was as if she had never existed, never inspired in me the pain and pity which (I had always told myself) would live on, trans-mitted into other forms perhaps — but live triumphantly on forever. I had worn her out like an old pair of socks, and the utter-ness of this disappearance surprised and shocked me. Could ‘love’
simply wear out like this? ‘Melissa’ I said again, hearing the lovely word echo in the silence. Name of a sad herb, name of a pilgrim to