The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [435]
The cemetery was completely deserted in the sunshine. Capodistria had certainly spared no expense to make his grave imposing and had achieved a fearsome vulgarity of decoration which was almost mind-wounding. Such cherubs and scrolls, such floral wreaths. On the slab was engraved the ironic text: ‘Not Lost But Gone Before’. Balthazar chuckled affectionately as he placed his flowers upon the grave and said ‘Happy Birthday’ to it. Then he turned aside, removing coat and hat for the sun was high and bright, and together we sat on a bench under a cypress tree while Clea ate toffees and he groped in his pockets for the bulky typewritten packet which contained Capodistria’s latest and lon gest letter. ‘Clea’ he said, ‘you must read it to us. I’ve forgotten my reading glasses. Besides, I would like to hear it through once, to see if it sounds less fantastic or more. Will you?’
Obediently she took the close-typed pages and started reading.
‘My dear M.B.’
‘The initials’ interposed Balthazar ‘stand for the nickname which Pursewarden fastened on me — Melancholia Borealis, no less. A tribute to my alleged Judaic gloom. Proceed, my dear Clea.’
The letter was in French.
‘I have been conscious, my dear friend, that I owed you some account of my new life here, yet though I have written you fairly frequently I have got into the habit of evading the subject. Why?
Well, my heart always sank at the thought of your derisive laugh. It is absurd, for I was never a sensitive man or quick to worry about the opinion of my neighbours. Another thing. It would have involved a long and tiresome explanation of the unease and
unfamiliarity I always felt at the meetings of the Cabal which sought to drench the world in its abstract goodness. I did not know then that my path was not the path of Light but of Darkness. I would have confused it morally or ethically with good and evil at that time. Now I recognize the path I am treading as simply the counterpoise — the bottom end of the see-saw, as it were —
which keeps the light side up in the air. Magic! I remember you once quoting to me a passage (quite nonsensical to me then) from Paracelsus. I think you added at the time that even such gibbe rish must mean something. It does! “True Alchemy which teaches how to make or transmute out of the five imperfect metals, requires no other materials but only the metals. The perfect metals are made out of the imperfect metals, through them and with them alone; for with other things is Luna (phantasy) but in the metals is Sol (wisdom).”
‘I leave a moment’s pause for your peculiar laugh, which in the past I would not have been slow to echo! What a mountain of rubbish surrounding the idea of the tinctura physicorum, you would observe. Yes but….
‘My first winter in this windy tower was not pleasant. The roof leaked. I did not have my books to solace me as yet. My quarters seemed rather cramped and I wondered about extending them. The property on which the tower stands above the sea had also a straggle of cottages and outbuildings upon it; here lodged the ancient, deaf couple of Italians who looked after my wants, washed and cleaned and fed me. I did not want to turn them out of their quarters but wondered whether I could not convert the extra couple of barns attached to their abode. It was then that I found, to my surprise, that they had another lodger whom I had never seen, a strange and solitary creature who only went abroad at night, and wore a monk’s cassock. I owe all my new orientation to my meeting with him. He is a defrocked Italian monk, who describes himself as a Rosicrucian and an alchemist. He lived here among a mountain of masonic manuscripts — some of very great age — which he was in the process of studying. It was he who first convinced me that this line of enquiry was (despite some disagreeable aspects) concerned with increasing man