Lawrence Durrell - The Alexandria Quartet

In religion? Well, I found no religion worth while which contained the faintest grain of propitiation — and which can escape the charge? Pace Balthazar it seemed to me that all churches, all sects, were at the best mere academies of self-instruction against fear. But the last, the worst failure (I buried my lips in the dark living hair of Justine), the failure with people: it had been brought about by a gradually increasing detachment of spirit which, while it freed me to sympathize, forbade me possession. I was gradually, inexplicably, becoming more and more deficient in love, yet better and better at self-giving — the best part of loving. This, I realized with horror, was the hold I now had over Justine. As a woman, a natural possessive, she was doomed to try and capture the part of myself which was forever beyond reach, the last painful place of refuge which was for me laughter and friendship. This sort of loving had made her, in a way, desperate for I did not depend on her; and the desire to possess can, if starved, render one absolutely possessed in the spirit oneself. How difficult it is to analyse these relationships which lie under the mere skin of our actions; for loving is only a sort of skin-language, sex a terminology merely.

And further to render down this sad relationship which had caused me so much pain — I saw that pain itself was the only food of memory: for pleasure ends in itself — all they had bequeathed me was a fund of permanent health — life-giving detachment. I was like a dry-cell battery. Uncommitted, I was free to circulate in the world of men and women like a guardian of the true rights of love — which is not passion, nor habit (they only qualify it) but which is the divine trespass of an immortal among mortals — Aphrodite-in-arms. Beleaguered thus, I was nevertheless defined and realized in myself by the very quality which (of course) hurt me most: selflessness. This is what Justine loved in me — not my personality. Women are sexual robbers, and it was this treasure of detachment she hoped to steal from me — the jewel growing in the toad’s head. It was the signature of this detachment she saw written across my life with all its haphazardness, discordance, disorderliness. My value was not in anything I achieved or anything I owned. Justine loved me because I presented to her something which was indestructible — a person already formed who could not be broken. She was haunted by the feeling that even while I was loving her I was wishing at the same time only to die! This she found unendurable.

And Melissa? She lacked of course the insight of Justine into my case. She only knew that my strength supported her where she was at her weakest — in her dealings with the world. She treasured every sign of my human weakness — disorderly habits, incapacity over money affairs, and so on. She loved my weaknesses because there she felt of use to me; Justine brushed all this aside as unworthy of her interest. She had detected another kind of strength.

I interested her only in this one particular which I could not offer her as a gift nor she steal from me. This is what is meant by possession — to be passionately at war for the qualities in one another to contend for the treasures of each other’s personalities. But how can such a war be anything but destructive and hopeless?

And yet, so entangled are human motives: it would be Melissa herself who had driven Nessim from his refuge in the world of fantasy towards an action which he knew we would all bitterly regret — our death. For it was she who, overmastered by the impulse of her unhappiness one night, approached the table at which he sat, before an empty champagne-glass, watching the cabaret with a pensive air: and blushing and trembling in her false eyelashes, blurted out eight words, ‘ Your wife is no longer faithful to you ’ — a phrase which stood quivering in his mind from then on, like a thrown knife. It is true that for a long time now his dossiers had been swollen with reports of this dreaded fact but these reports were like newspaper-accounts of a catastrophe which had occurred a long way off, in a country which one had not visited. Now he was suddenly face to face with an eye-witness, a victim, a survivor….

The resonance of this one phrase refecundated his powers of feeling. The whole dead tract of paper suddenly rose up and screeched at him.

Melissa’s dressing-room was an evil-smelling cubicle full of the coiled pipes which emptied the lavatories. She had a single poignant strip of cracked mirror and a little shelf dressed with the kind of white paper upon which wedding-cakes are built. Here she always set out the jumble of powders and crayons which she misused so fearfully.

In this mirror the image of Selim blistered and flickered in the dancing gas-jets like a spectre from the underworld. He spoke with an incisive finish which was a copy of his master’s; in this copied voice she could feel some of the anxiety the secretary felt for the only human being he truly worshipped, and to whose anxieties he reacted like a planchette.

Melissa was afraid now, for she knew that offence given to the great could, by the terms of the city, be punished swiftly and dreadfully. She was aghast at what she had done and fought back a desire to cry as she picked off her eyelashes with trembling hands.

There was no way of refusing the invitation. She dressed in her shabby best and carrying her fatigue like a heavy pack followed Selim to the great car which stood in deep shadow. She was helped in beside Nessim. They moved off slowly into the dense crepuscular evening of an Alexandria which, in her panic, she no longer recognized. They scouted a sea turned to sapphire and turned inland, folding up the slums, towards Mareotis and the bituminous slag-heaps of Mex where the pressure of the headlights now peeled off layer after layer of the darkness, bringing up small intimate scenes of Egyptian life — a drunkard singing, a biblical figure on a mule with two children escaping from Herod, a porter sorting sacks — swiftly, like someone dealing cards. She followed these familiar sights with emotion, for behind lay the desert, its emptiness echoing like a seashell. All this time her companion had not spoken, and she had not dared to risk so much as a glance in his direction.

Now when the pure steely lines of the dunes came up under the late moon Nessim drew the car to a standstill. Groping in his pocket for his cheque-book he said in a trembling voice, his eyes full of tears: ‘What is the price of your silence?’ She turned to him and, seeing for the first time the gentleness and sorrow of that dark face, found her fear replaced by an overwhelming shame. She recognized in his expression the weakness for the good which could never render him an enemy of her kind. She put a timid hand on his arm and said: ‘I am so ashamed. Please forgive me. I did not know what I was saying.’ And her fatigue overcame her so that her emotion which threatened her with tears turned to a yawn.

Now they stared at one another with a new understanding, recognizing each other as innocents. For a minute it was almost as if they had fallen in love with each other from sheer relief.

The car gathered momentum again like their silence — and soon they were racing across the desert towards the steely glitter of stars, and a horizon stained black with the thunder of surf. Nessim, with this strange sleepy creature at his side, found himself thinking over and over again: ‘Thank God I am not a genius — for a genius has nobody in whom he can confide.’ The glances he snatched at her enabled him to study her, and to study me in her. Her loveliness must have disarmed and disturbed him as it had me. It was a beauty which filled one with the terrible premonition that it had been born to be a target for the forces of destruction. Perhaps he remembered an anecdote of Pursewarden’s in which she figured, for the latter had found her as Nessim himself had done, in the same stale cabaret; only on this particular evening she had been sitting in a row of dance-hostesses selling dance-tickets. Pursewarden, who was gravely drunk, took her to the floor and, after a moment’s silence, addressed her in his sad yet masterful way: ‘ Comment vous defendez-vous contre la solitude? ’ he asked her. Melissa turned upon him an eye replete with all the candour of experience and replied softly: ‘ Monsieur , je suis devenue la solitude mкme. ’ Pursewarden was sufficiently struck to remember and repeat this passage later to his friends, adding: ‘I suddenly thought to myself that here was a woman one might very well love.’ Yet he did not, as far as I know, take the risk of revisiting her, for the book was going well, and he recognized in the kindling of this sympathy a trick being played on him by the least intent part of his nature. He was writing about love at the time and did not wish to disturb the ideas he had formed on the subject. (‘I cannot fall in love’ he made a character exclaim ‘for I belong to that ancient secret society — the Jokers!’; and elsewhere speaking about his marriage he wrote: ‘I found that as well as displeasing another I also displeased myself; now, alone, I have only myself to displease.