The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [59]
The whole of the long colloquy which ensued took place over this prostrate body. I took him to be asleep, but in fact he must have been awake for he subsequently reproduced much of Justine’s conversation in a cruel satirical short story, which for some reason amused Justine though it caused me great pain. He described her black eyes shining with unshed tears as she said (sitting at the mirror, the comb travelling through her hair, crackling and sput-tering like her voice). ‘When I first met Nessim and knew that I was falling in love with him I tried to save us both. I deliberately took a lover — a dull brute of a Swede, hoping to wound him and
force him to detach himself from his feeling for me. The Swede’s wife had left him and I said (anything to stop him snivelling):
“Tell me how she behaves and I will imitate her. In the dark we are all meat and treacherous however our hair kinks or skin smells. Tell me, and I will give you the wedding-smile and fall into your arms like a mountain of silk.” And all the time I was thinking over and over again: “Nessim. Nessim.” ’
I remember in this context, too, a remark of Pursewarden’s which summed up his attitude to our friends. ‘Alexandr ia!’ he said (it was on one of those long moonlit walks). ‘Jews with their cafeteria mysticism! How could one deal with it in words? Place and people?’ Perhaps then he was meditating this cruel short story and casting about for ways and means to deal with us. ‘Justine and her city are alike in that they both have a strong flavour without having any real character.’
I am recalling now how during that last spring (forever) we walked together at full moon, overcome by the soft dazed air of the city, the quiet ablutions of water and moonlight that polished it like a great casket. An aerial lunacy among the deserted trees of the dark squares, and the long dusty roads reaching away from mid-night to midnight, bluer than oxygen. The passing faces had be-come gem-like, tranced — the baker at his machine making the staff of tomorrow’s life, the lover hurrying back to his lodging, nailed into a silver helmet of panic, the six-foot cinema posters borrowing a ghastly magnificence from the moon which seemed laid across the nerves like a bow.
We turn a corner and the world becomes a pattern of arteries, splashed with silver and deckle-edged with shadow. At this far end of Kom El Dick not a soul abroad save an occasional obsessive policeman, lurking like a guilty wish in the city’s mind. Our foot-steps run punctually as metronomes along the deserted pavements: two men, in their own time and city, remote from the world, walk-ing as if they were treading one of the lugubrious canals of the moon. Pursewarden is speaking of the book which he has always wanted to write, and of the difficulty which besets a city-man when he faces a work or art.
‘If you think of yourself as a sleeping city for example … what?
You can sit quiet and hear the processes going on, going about their business; volition, desire, will, cognition, passion, conation. I
mean like the million legs of a centipede carrying on with the body powerless to do anything about it. One gets exhausted trying to circumnavigate these huge fields of experience. We are never free, we writers. I could explain it much more clearly if it was dawn. I long to be musical in body and mind. I want style, consort. Not the little mental squirts as if through the ticker-tape of the mind. It is the age’s disease, is it not? It explains the huge waves of occultism lapping round us. The Cabal, now, and Balthazar. He will never understand that it is with God we must be the most careful; for He makes such a powerful appeal to what is lowest in human nature