The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [380]
‘Where has Clea gone?’ I asked.
‘Nowhere. She was here yesterday afternoon asking for you.’
‘Nessim said she had gone somewhere.’
‘Perhaps to Cairo for the afternoon; where have you been?’
‘Out to Karm for the night.’
There was a long silence during which we eyed each other. There were clearly questions in his mind which he tactfully did not wish to inflict on me; and for my part there was little that I felt I could explain. I picked up an apple and took a bite from it.
‘And the writing?’ he said after a long silence.
‘It has stopped. I don’t seem to be able to carry it any further for the moment. I somehow can’t match the truth to the illusions which are necessary to art without the gap showing — you know, like an unbasted seam. I was thinking of it at Karm, confronted again by Justine. Thinking how despite the factua l falsities of the manuscript which I sent you the portrait was somehow poetically true — psychographically if you like. But an artist who can’t solder the elements together falls short somewhere. I’m on the wrong track.’
‘I don’t see why. In fact this very discovery should encourage rather than hamper you. I mean about the mutability of all truth. Each fact can have a thousand motivations, all equally valid, and each fact a thousand faces. So many truths which have little to do with fact! Your duty is to hunt them down. At each moment of time all multiplicity waits at your elbow. Why, Darley, this should thrill you and give your writing the curves of a pregnant woman.’
‘On the contrary, it has faulted me. For the moment anyway. And now that I am back here in the real Alexandria from which I drew so many of my illustrations I don’t feel the need for more writing — or at any rate writing which doesn’t fulfil the difficult criteria I see lurking behind art. You remember Pursewarden writing: “A novel should be an act of divination by entrails, not a careful record of a game of pat-ball on some vicarage lawn!” ’
‘Yes.’
‘And so indeed it should. But now I am confronted once more with my models I am ashamed to have botched them up. If I start again it will be from another angle. But there is still so much I don’t know, and presumably never will, about all of you. Capo-distria, for example, where does he fit in?’
‘You sound as if you knew he was alive!’
‘Mnemjian told me so.’
‘Yes. The mystery isn’t a very complicated one. He was working for Nessim and compromised himself by a serious slip. It was necessary to clear out. Conveniently it happened at a time when he was all but bankrupt financially. The insurance money was most necessary! Nessim provided the setting and I provided the corpse. You know we get quite a lot of corpses of one sort or another. Paupers. People who donate their bodies, or actually sell them in
advance for a fixed sum. The medical schools need them. It wasn’t hard to obtain a private one, relatively fresh. I tried to hint at the truth to you once but you did not take my meaning. Anyway the thing’s worked smoothly. Da Capo now lives in a handsomely con-verted Martello tower, dividing his time between studying black magic and working on certain schemes of Nessim’s about which I know nothing. Indeed I see Nessim only rarely, and Justine not at all. Though guests are permitted by special police order they never invite anyone out to Karm. Justine telephones people from time to time for a chat, that is all. You have been privileged, Darley. They must have got you a permit. But I am relieved to see you cheerful and undesponding. You have made a step forward some-where, haven’t you?’
‘I don’t know. I worry less.’
‘But you will be happy this time, I feel it; much has changed but much has remained the same. Mountolive tells me he has recommended you for a censorship post, and that you will pro-bably live with Pombal, until you have had a chance to look round a bit.’
‘Another mystery! I hardly know Mountolive. Why has he suddenly constituted himself my benefactor?