Lawrence Durrell - The Alexandria Quartet

She was kissing and cherishing a painted image of England. It was for him the oddest experience in the world. He felt the tears come into his eyes as she continued the magnificent peroration, suiting her clear voice to the melody of the prose. ‘Or will you, youths of England, make your country again a royal throne of kings, a sceptred isle, for all the world a source of light, a centre of peace; mistress of learning and the arts; faithful guardian of great memories in the midst of irreverent and ephemeral visions; a faithful servant of time-tried principles, under temptation from fond experiments and licentious desires; and amidst the cruel and clamorous jealousies of the nations, worshipped in her strange valour, of goodwill towards men?’ The words began to vibrate in his skull.

‘Stop. Stop’ he cried sharply. ‘We are not like that any longer, Leila.’ It was an absurd book-fed dream this Copt had discovered and translated. He felt as if all those magical embraces had been somehow won under false pretences — as if her absurd thoughts were reducing the whole thing, diminishing the scale of it to something as shadowy and unreal as, say, a transaction with a woman of the streets. Can you fall in love with the stone effigy of a dead crusader?

‘You asked me why ’ she said, still with contempt. ‘Because’ with a sigh ‘you are English, I suppose.’ (It surprised him each time he went over this scene in his mind and only an oath could express the astonishment of it. ‘Damn’.)

And then, like all the inexperienced lovers since the world began, he was not content to let things be; he must explore and evaluate them in his conscious mind. None of the answers she gave him was expected. If he mentioned her husband she at once became angry, interrupting him with withering directness: ‘I love him.

I will not have him lightly spoken of. He is a noble man and I would never do anything to wound him.’

‘But … but …’ stammered the young Mountolive; and now, laughing at his perplexity, she once more put her arms about him saying ‘Fool. David, fool ! It is he who told me to take you for a lover. Think — is he not wise in his way? Fearing to lose me altogether by a mischance? Have you never starved for love?

Don’t you know how dangerous love is?’ No, he did not know.

What on earth was an Englishman to make of these strange patterns of thought, these confused and contending loyalties? He was struck dumb. ‘Only I must not fall in love and I won’t.’ Was this why she had elected to love Mountolive’s England through him rather than Mountolive himself? He could find no answer to this. The limitations of his immaturity tongue-tied him. He closed his eyes and felt as if he were falling backwards into black space.

And Leila, divining this, found in him an innocence which was itself endearing: in a way she set herself to make a man of him, using every feminine warmth, every candour. He was both a lover to her and a sort of hapless man—child who could be guided by her towards his own growth. Only (she must have made the reservation quite clearly in her own mind) she must beware of any possible resentment which he might feel at this tutelage. So she hid her own experience and became for him almost a companion of his own age, sharing a complicity which somehow seemed so innocent, so beyond reproach, that even his sense of guilt was almost lulled, and he began to drink in through her a new resolution and selfconfidence. He told himself with equal resolution that he also must respect her reservations and not fall in love, but this kind of dissociation is impossible for the young. He could not distinguish between his own various emotional needs, between passion-love and the sort of romance fed on narcissism. His desire strangled him. He could not qualify it. And here his English education hampered him at every step. He could not even feel happy without feeling guilty. But all this he did not know very clearly: he only half-guessed that he had discovered more than a lover, more than an accomplice. Leila was not only more experienced; to his utter chagrin he found that she was even better read, in his own language, than he was, and better instructed. But, as a model companion and lover, she never let him feel it. There are so many resources open to a woman of experience. She took refuge always in a tenderness which expressed itself in teasing. She chided his ignorance and provoked his curiosity. And she was amused by the effect of her passion on him — those kisses which fell burning like spittle upon a hot iron. Through her eyes he began to see Egypt once more — but extended through a new dimension. To have a grasp of the language was nothing, he now realized; for Leila exposed the hollowness of the knowledge when pitted against understanding.

An inveterate note-taker by habit, he found his little pocket diary now swollen with the data which emerged from their long rides together, but it was always data which concerned the country, for he did not dare to put down a single word about his feelings or so much as record even Leila’s name. In this manner:

‘ Sunday. Riding through a poor fly-blown village my companion points to marks like cuneiform scratched on the walls of houses and asks if I can read them. Like a fool I say no , but perhaps they are Amharic ? Laughter. Explanation is that a venerable pedlar who travels through here every six months carries a special henna from Medina , much esteemed here by virtue of its connection with the holy city. People are mostly too poor to pay , so he extends credit , but lest he or they forget , marks his tally on the clay wall with a sherd.

‘ Monday. Ali says that shooting stars are stones thrown by the angels in heaven to drive off evil djinns when they try to eavesdrop on the conversations in Paradise and learn the secrets of the future. All Arabs terrified of the desert , even Bedouin. Strange.

‘ Also: the pause in conversation which we call “ Angels Passing ” is greeted another way. After a moment of silence one says: “ Wahed Dhu ” or “ One is God ” and then the whole company repeats fervently in response “ La Illah Illa Allah ” or “ No God but one God ” before normal conversation is resumed. These little habits are extremely taking.

‘ Also: my host uses a curious phrase when he speaks of retiring from business. He calls it “ making his soul ” .

‘ Also: have never before tasted the Yemen coffee with a speck of ambergris to each cup. It is delicious.

‘ Also: Mohammed Shebab offered me on meeting a touch of jasmine-scent from a phial with a glass stopper — as we would offer a cigarette in Europe.

‘ Also: they love birds. In a tumbledown cemetery I saw graves with little drinking-wells cut in the marble for them which my companion told me were filled on Friday visits by women of the village.

‘ Also: Ali , the Negro factor , an immense eunuch , told me that they feared above all blue eyes and red hair as evil signs. Odd that the examining angels in the Koran as their most repulsive features have blue eyes ’ So the young Mountolive noted and pondered upon the strange ways of the people among whom he had come to live, painstakingly as befitted a student of manners so remote from his own; yet also in a kind of ecstasy to find a sort of poetic correspondence between the reality and the dream-picture of the East which he had constructed from his reading. There war less of a disparity here than between the twin images which Leila appeared to nurse — a poetic image of England and its exemplar the shy and in many ways callow youth she had taken for a lover.