The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [474]
“But what is the object?” I said in bewilderment. Here all at once she became serious, though her eyes sparkled with clever malevo-lence. “We have started something, Nessim and I. We have made a break through at last. Clea, I am so happy, I could cry. It is something much bigger this time, international. We will have to go to Switzerland next year, probably for good. Nessim’s luck has suddenly changed. I can’t tell you any details.”
‘When we reached the table upstairs Nessim had already arrived and was talking to Memlik. His appearance staggered me, he looked so much younger, and so elegant and self-possessed. It gave me a queer pang, too, to see the passionate way they embraced, Nessim and Justine, as if oblivious to the rest of the world. Right there in the café, with such ecstatic passion that I did not know where to look.
‘Memlik sat there with his expensive gloves on his knee, smiling gent ly. It was clear that he enjoyed the life of high society, and I could see from the way he offered me an ice that he also enjoyed the company of white women!
‘Ah! it is getting tired, this miraculous hand. I must catch the evening post with this letter. There are a hundred things to attend to before I start the bore of packing. As for you, wise one, I have a feeling that you too perhaps have stepped across the threshold into the kingdom of your imagination, to take possession of it once and for all. Write and tell me — or save it for some small café under a chestnut-tree, in smoky autumn weather, by the Seine.
‘I wait, quite serene and happy, a real human being, an artist at last.
‘Clea.’
* * * * *
But it was to be a little while yet before the clouds parted before me to reveal the secret landscape of which she was writing, and which she would henceforward appropriate, brushstroke by slow brushstroke. It had been so long in forming inside me, this precious image, that I too was as unprepared as she had been. It came on a blue day, quite unpremeditated, quite unannounced,
and with such ease I would not have believed it. I had been until then like some timid girl, scared of the birth of her first child. Yes, one day I found myself writing down with trembling fingers the four words (four letters! four faces!) with which every story-teller since the world began has staked his slender claim to the attention of his fellow-men. Words which presage simply the old story of an artist coming of age. I wrote: ‘Once upon a time….’
And I felt as if the whole universe had given me a nudge!
* * * * *
WORKPOINTS
Hamid’s story of Darley and Melissa.
* * *
Mountolive’s child by the dancer Grishkin. The result of the duel. The Russian letters. Her terror of Liza when after her mother’s death she is sent to her father.
* * *
Memlik and Justine in Geneva. Nessim’s new ventures.
* * *
Balthazar’s encounter with Arnauti in Venice. The violet sun-glasses, the torn overcoat, pockets full of crumbs to feed the pigeons. The scene in Florian’s. The shuffling walk of general paralysis. Conversations on the balcony of the little pension over the rotting backwater of the canal. Was Justine actually Claud ia?
He cannot be sure. ‘Time is memory, they say; the art however is to revive it and yet avoid remembering. You speak of Alexandria. I can no longer even imagine it. It has dissolved. A work of art is something which is more like life than life itself!’ The slow death.
* * *
The northern journey of Narouz, and the great battle of the sticks.
Smyrna. The manuscripts, The Annals of Time. The theft.
SOME NOTES FOR CLEA (by Pursewarden)
* Page 737
Big advances are not made by analytical procedures but by direct vision. Yes, but how?
* * *
Art is not art unless it threatens your very existence. Could you repeat that, please, more slowly?
* * *
As you get older and want to die more a strange kind of happiness seizes you; you suddenly realize that all art must end in a celebration. This is what drives the impotent mad with rage. They cannot provoke that fruitful compulsion of the Present, even though their scrotums be as hairy as Cape Gooseberries.