Lawrence Durrell - The Alexandria Quartet

‘As for the many it is already included in the part of their nature which they least wish to admit or examine. I do not believe that there is any system which can do more than pervert the essential idea. And then, all these attempts to circumscribe God in words or ideas…. No one thing can explain everything: though everything can illuminate something. God, I must be still drunk. If God were anything he would be an art. Sculpture or medicine. But the immense extension of knowledge in this our age, the growth of new sciences, makes it almost impossible for us to digest the available flavours and put them to use.

‘Holding a candle in your hand, I mean, you can throw the shadow of the retinal blood-vessels on the wall. It isn’t silent enough. It’s never dead still in there: never quiet enough for the trismegistus to be fed. All night long you can hear the rush of blood in the cerebral arteries. The loins of thinking. It starts you going back along the cogs of historical action, cause and effect.

You can’t rest ever, you can’t give over and begin to scry. You climb through the physical body, softly parting the muscleschemes to admit you — muscle striped and unstriped; you examine the coil ignition of the guts in the abdomen, the sweetbreads, the liver choked with refuse like a sink—filter, the bag of urine, the red unbuckled belt of the intestines, the soft horny corridor of the oesophagus, the glottis with its mucilage softer than the pouch of a kangaroo. What do I mean? You are searching for a co-ordinating scheme, the syntax of a Will which might stabilize everything and take the tragedy out of it. The sweat breaks out on your face, a cold panic as you feel the soft contraction and expansion of the viscera busy about their job, regardless of the man watching them who is yourself. A whole city of processes, a factory for the production of excrement, my goodness, a daily sacrifice. An offering to the toilet for every one you make to the altar. Where do they meet? Where is the correspondence? Outside in the darkness by the railway bridge the lover of this man waits for him with the same indescribable maggotry going on in her body and blood; wine swilling the conduits, the pylorus disgorging like a sucker, the incommensurable bacteriological world multiplying in every drop of semen, spittle, sputum, musk. He takes a spinal column in his arms, the ducts flooded with ammonia, the meninges exuding their pollen, the cornea glowing in its little crucible….’ He begins now that shocking boyish laughter, throwing back his head until the moonlight plays upon his perfect white teeth under the trimmed moustache.

It was on such a night that our footsteps led us to Balthazar’s door, and seeing his light on, we knocked. The same night, on the old horn gramophone (with an emotion so deep that it was almost horror) I heard some amateur’s recording of the old poet reciting the lines which begin: Ideal voices and much beloved Of those who died, of those who are Now lost for us like the very dead; Sometimes within a dream they speak Or in the ticking brain a thought revives them….

These fugitive memories explain nothing, illuminate nothing: yet they return again and again when I think of my friends as if the very circumstances of our habits had become impregnated with what we then felt, the parts we then acted. The slither of tyres across the waves of the desert under a sky blue and frost-bound in winter; or in summer a fearful lunar bombardment which turned the sea to phosphorus — bodies shining like tin, crushed in electric bubbles; or walking to the last spit of sand near Montaza, sneaking through the dense green darkness of the King’s gardens, past the drowsy sentry, to where the force of the sea was suddenly crippled and the waves hobbled over the sand-bar. Or walking arm-in-arm down the long gallery, already gloomy with an unusual yellow winter fog. Her hand is cold so she has slipped it in my pocket.

Today because she has no emotion whatsoever she tells me that she is in love with me — something she has always refused to do. At the long windows the rain hisses down suddenly. The dark eyes are cool and amused. A centre of blackness in things which trembles and changes shape. ‘I am afraid of Nessim these days. He has changed.’ We are standing before the Chinese paintings from the Louvre. ‘The meaning of space’ she says with disgust. There is no form, no pigment, no lens any more — simply a gaping hole into which the infinite drains slowly into the room: a blue gulf where the tiger’s body was, emptying itself into the preoccupied atmosphere of the studios. Afterwards we walk up the dark staircase to the top floor to see Sveva, to put on the gramophone and dance.

The little model pretends that she is heartbroken because Pombal has cast her off after a ‘whirlwind romance’ lasting nearly a month.

My friend himself is a little surprised at the force of an attachment which could make him think of one woman for so long a time.

He has cut himself while shaving and his face looks grotesque with a moustache of surgical tape stuck to it. ‘It is a city of aberrations’ he repeats angrily. ‘I very nearly married her. It is infuriating.

Thank God that the veil lifted when it did. It was seeing her naked in front of the mirror. All of a sudden I was disgusted — though I mentally admitted a sort of Renaissance dignity in the fallen breasts, the waxy skin, the sunken belly and the little peasant paws. All of a sudden I sat up in bed and said to myself “My God!

She is an elephant in need of a coat of whitewash!” ’ Now Sveva is quietly sniffing into her handkerchief as she recounts the extravagant promises which Pombal has made her, and which will never be fulfilled. ‘It was a curious and dangerous attachment for an easy-going man’ (hear Pombal’s voice explaining). ‘It felt as if her cool murderous charity had eaten away my locomotive centres, paralysed my nervous system. Thank God I am free to concentrate on my work once more.’ He is troubled about his work. Rumours of his habits and general outlook have begun to get back to the Consulate. Lying in bed he plans a campaign which will get him crucified and promoted to a post with more scope. ‘I have decided that I simply must get my cross. I am going to give several skilfully graded parties. I shall count on you: I shall need a few shabby people at first in order to give my boss the feeling that he can patronize me socially. He is a complete parvenu of course and rose on his wife’s fortune and judicious smarming of powerful people. Worst of all he has a distinct inferiority complex about my own birth and family background. He has still not quite decided whether to do me down or not; but he has been taking soundings at the Quai D’Orsay to see how well padded I am there. Since my uncle died, of course, and my godfather the bishop was involved in that huge scandal over the brothel in Reims, I find myself rather less steady on my feet.

I shall have to make the brute feel protective, feel that I need encouraging and bringing out. Pouagh! First a rather shabby party with one celebrity only. Oh, why did I join the service? Why have I not a small fortune of my own?’ Hearing all this in Sveva’s artificial tears and then walking down the draughty staircase again arm in arm thinking not of Sveva, not of Pombal, but of the passage in Arnauti where he says of Justine: ‘Like women who think by biological precept and without the help of reason. To such women how fatal an error it is to give oneself; there is simply a small chewing noise, as when the cat reaches the backbone of the mouse.’ The wet pavements are slick underfoot from the rain, and the air has become dense with the moisture so ardently longed for by the trees in the public gardens, the statues and other visitants.

Justine is away upon another tack, walking slowly in her glorious silk frock with the dark lined cape, head hanging. She stops in front of a lighted shop-window and takes my arms so that I face her, looking into my eyes: ‘I am thinking about going away’ she says in a quiet puzzled voice. ‘Something is happening to Nessim and I don’t know what it is as yet.’ Then suddenly the tears come into her eyes and she says: ‘For the first time I am afraid, and I don’t know why.’