The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [49]
‘Baudelaire says that copulation is the lyric of the mob. Not any more, alas! For sex is dying. In another century we shall lie with our tongues in each other’s mouths, silent and passionless as sea-fruit. Oh yes! Indubitably so.’ And he quoted the Arabic proverb which he uses as an epigraph to his trilogy: ‘The world is like a cucumber — today it’s in your hand, tomorrow up your arse.’ We then resumed our stitching, crab-like advance in the direction of his hotel, he repeating the word ‘indubitably’ with obvious pleasure at the soft plosive sound of it.
He was unshaven and haggard, but in comparatively good spirits after the walk and we resorted to a bottle of gin which he kept in the commode by his bed. I commented on the two bulging suit-cases which stood by the dressing-table ready packed; over a chair lay his raincoat stuffed with newspapers, pyjamas, toothpaste, and so on. He was catching the night train for Gaza, he said. He wanted to slack off and pay a visit to Petra. The galley-proofs of his latest novel had already been corrected, wrapped up and ad-dressed. They lay dead upon the marble top of the dressing-table. I recognized in his sour and dejected attitude the exhaustion which pursues the artist after he has brought a piece of work to com-pletion. These are the low moments when the long flirtation with suicide begins afresh.
Unfortunately, though I have searched my mind, I can recall little of our actual conversation, though I have often tried to do so. The fact that this was our last meeting has invested it, in retro-spect, with a significance which surely it cannot have possessed. Nor, for the purposes of this writing, has he ceased to exist; he has simply stepped into the quicksilver of a mirror as we all must —
to leave our illnesses, or evil acts, the hornets’ nest of our desires, still operative for good or evil in the real world — which is the memory of our friends. Yet the presence of death always refreshes experience thus — that is its function to help us deliberate on the novelty of time. Yet at that moment we were both situated at points equidistant from death — or so I think. Perhaps some quiet pre-meditation blossomed in him even then — no matter. I cannot tell. It is not mysterious that any artist should desire to end a life which he has exhausted — (a character in the last volume exclaims: ‘For years one has to put up with the feeling that people do not care, really care, about one; then one day with growing alarm, one
realizes that it is God who does not care: and not merely that he does not care, he does not care one way or the other’) . But this aside reminds me of one small fragment of that drunken conversation. He spoke derisively of Balthazar, of his preoccupa-tion with religion, of the Cabal (of which he had only heard). I listened without interrupting him and gradually his voice ran down like a time-piece overcome by the weight of seconds. He stood up to pour himself a drink and said: ‘One needs a tremendous ignorance to approach God. I have always known too much, I suppose.’
These are the sort of fragments which tease the waking mind on evenings like these, walking about in the wintry darkness; until at last I turn back to the crackling fire of olive-wood in the old-fashioned arched hearth where Justine lies asleep in her cot of sweet-smelling pine.
How much of him can I claim to know? I realize that each per-son can only claim one aspect of our character as part of his know-ledge. To every one we turn a different face of the prism. Over and over again I have found myself surprised by observations which brought this home to me. As for example when Justine said of Pombal, ‘one of the great primates of sex.’ To me my friend had never seemed predatory; only self-indulgent to a ludicrous degree. I saw him as touching and amusing, faintly to be cherished for an inherent ridiculousness. But she must have seen in him the great, soft-footed cat he was (to her).
And as for Pursewarden, I remember, too, that in the very act of speaking thus about religious ignorance he straightened himself and caught sight of his pale reflection in the mirror. The glass was raised to his lips, and now, turning his head he squirted out upon his own glittering reflection a mouthful of the drink. That remains clearly in my mind; a reflection liquefying in the mirror of that shabby, expensive room which seems now so appropriate a place for the scene which must have followed later that night.