The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [83]
He paused only to say: ‘If this is true you are only taking advan-tage of an illness in loving her,’ and the remark struck me like the edge of an axe wielded by someone of enormous and unconscious strength.
* * * * *
When the time for the great yearly shoot on Lake Mareotis came round Nessim began to experience a magical sense of relief. He recognized at last that what had to be decided would be decided at this time and at no other. He had the air of a man who has fought a long illness successfully. Had his judgement indeed been so faulty even though it had not been conscious? During the years of his marriage he had repeated on every day the words, ‘I am so happy’
— fatal as the striking of a grandfather-clock upon which silence is forever encroaching. Now he could say so no longer. Their common life was like some cable buried in the sand which, in some inexplic-able way, at a point impossible to discover, had snapped, plunging them both into an unaccustomed and impenetrable darkness. The madness itself, of course, took no account of circumstances. It appeared to superimpose itself not upon personalities tortured beyond the bounds of endurance but purely upon a given situa-tion. In a real sense we all shared it, though only Nessim acted it out, exemplified it in the flesh, as a person. The short period which preceded the great shoot on Mareotis lasted for perhaps a month —
certainly for very little more. Here again to those who did not know him nothing was obvious. Yet the delusions multiplied them-selves at such a rate that in his own records they give one the illusion of watching bacteria under a microscope — the pullulation of healthy cells, as in cancer, which have gone off their heads, renounced their power to repress themselves.
The mysterious series of code messages transmitted by the street names he encountered showed definite irrefutable signs of a supernatural agency at work full of the threat of unseen punish
ment — though whether for himself or for others he could not tell. Balthazar’s treatise lying withering in the window of a bookshop and the same day coming upon his father’s grave in the Jewish cemetery — with those distinguishing names engraved upon the stone which echoed all the melancholy of European Jewry in exile. Then the question of noises in the room next door: a sort of heavy breathing and the sudden simultaneous playing of three pianos. These, he knew, were not delusions but links in an occult chain, logical and persuasive only to the mind which had passed beyond the frame of causality. It was becoming harder and harder to pretend to be sane by the standards of ordinary behaviour. He was going through the Devastatio described by Swedenborg. The coal fires had taken to burning into extraordinary shapes. This could be proved by relighting them over and over again to verify his find ings — terrifying landscapes and faces. The mole on Justine’s wrist was also troubling. At meal times he fought against his desire to touch it so feverishly that he turned pale and almost fainted.
One afternoon a crumpled sheet began breathing and continued for a space of about half an hour, assuming the shape of the body it covered. One night he woke to the soughing of great wings and saw a bat-like creature with the head of a violin resting upon the bedrail.
Then the counter-agency of the powers of good — a message brought by a ladybird which settled on the notebook in which he was writing; the music of Weber’s Pan played every day between three and four on a piano in an adjoining house. He felt that his mind had become a battle-ground for the forces of good and evil and that his task was to strain every nerve to recognize them, but it was not easy. The phenomenal world had begun to play tricks on him so that his senses were beginning to accuse reality itself of inconsistency. He was in peril of a mental overthrow. Once his waistcoat started ticking as it hung on the back of a chair, as if inhabited by a colony of foreign heartbeats. But when investigated it stopped and refused to continue for the benefit of Selim whom he had called into the room. The same day he saw his initials in gold upon a cloud reflected in a shop-window in the Rue St Saba. Everything seemed proved by this.