Lawrence Durrell - The Alexandria Quartet

Too abstract for you? Then I have expressed the idea badly. I mean, in Justine’s case, having become cured of the mental aberrations brought about by her dreams, her fears, she has been deflated like a bag. For so long the fantasy occupied the foreground of her life that now she is dispossessed of her entire stock-in-trade.

It is not only that the death of Capodistria has removed the chief actor in this shadow-play, her chief gaoler. The illness itself had kept her on the move, and when it died it left in its place total exhaustion. She has, so to speak, extinguished with, her sexuality her very claims on life, almost her reason. People driven like this to the very boundaries of freewill are forced to turn somewhere for help, to make absolute decisions. If she had not been an Alexandrian (i.e. sceptic) this would have taken the form of religious conversion. How is one to say these things? It is not a question of growing to be happy or unhappy. A whole block of one’s life suddenly falls into the sea, as perhaps yours did with Melissa. But (this is how it works in life, the retributive law which brings good for evil and evil for good) her own release also released Nessim from the inhibitions governing his passional life. I think he always felt that so long as Justine lived he would never be able to endure the slightest human relationship with anyone else. Melissa proved him wrong, or at least so he thought; but with Justine’s departure the old heartsickness cropped up and he was filled with overwhelming disgust for what he had done to her — to Melissa.

‘Lovers are never equally matched — do you think? One always overshadows the other and stunts his or her growth so that the overshadowed one must always be tormented by a desire to escape, to be free to grow. Surely this is the only tragic thing about love?

‘So that if from another point of view Nessim did plan Capodistria’s death (as has been widely rumoured and believed) he could not have chosen a more calamitous path. It would indeed have been wiser to kill you. Perhaps he hoped in releasing Justine from the succubus (as Arnauti before him) he would free her for himself.

(He said so once — you told me.) But quite the opposite has happened. He has granted her a sort of absolution, or poor Capodistria unwittingly did — with the result that she thinks of him now not as a lover but as a sort of arch-priest. She speaks of him with a reverence which would horrify him to hear.

She will never go back, how could she? And if she did he would know at once that he had lost her forever — for those who stand in a confessional relationship to ourselves can never love us, never truly love us.

‘(Of you Justine said simply, with a slight shrug: “I had to put him out of my mind”.)

‘Well, these are some of the thoughts that passed through my mind as the train carried me down through the orange groves to the coast; they were thrown into sharp relief by the book I had chosen to read on the journey, the penultimate volume of God is a Humorist. How greatly Pursewarden has gained in stature since his death! It was before as if he stood between his own books and our understanding of them. I see now that what we found enigmatic about the man was due to a fault in ourselves. An artist does not live a personal life as we do, he hides it, forcing us to go to his books if we wish to touch the true source of his feelings. Underneath all his preoccupations with sex, society, religion, etc. (all the staple abstractions which allow the forebrain to chatter) there is, quite simply, a man tortured beyond endurance by the lack of tenderness in the world.

‘And all this brings me back to myself, for I too have been changing in some curious way. The old self-sufficient life has transformed itself into something a little hollow, a little empty. It no longer answers my deepest needs. Somewhere deep inside a tide seems to have turned in my nature. I do not know why but it is towards you, my dear friend, that my thoughts have turned more and more of late. Can one be frank? Is there a friendship possible this side of love which could be sought and found? I speak no more of love — the word and its conventions have become odious to me.

But is there a friendship possible to attain which is deeper, even limitlessly deep, and yet wordless, idealess? It seems somehow necessary to find a human being to whom one can be faithful, not in the body (I leave that to the priests) but in the culprit mind? But perhaps this is not the sort of problem which will interest you much these days. Once or twice I have felt the absurd desire to come to you and offer my services in looking after the child perhaps. But it seems clear now that you do not really need anybody any more, and that you value your solitude above all things….’ There are a few more lines and then the affectionate superscription.

*******

The cicadas are throbbing in the great planes, and the summer Mediterranean lies before me in all its magnetic blueness. Somewhere out there, beyond the mauve throbbing line of the horizon lies Africa, lies Alexandria, maintaining its tenuous grasp on one’s affections through memories which are already refunding themselves slowly into forgetfulness; memory of friends, of incidents long past. The slow unreality of time begins to grip them, blurring the outlines — so that sometimes I wonder whether these pages record the actions of real human beings; or whether this is not simply the story of a few inanimate objects which precipitated drama around them — I mean a black patch, a watch-key and a couple of dispossessed wedding-rings….

Soon it will be evening and the clear night sky will be dusted thickly with summer stars. I shall be here, as always, smoking by the water. I have decided to leave Clea’s last letter unanswered. I no longer wish to coerce anyone, to make promises, to think of life in terms of compacts, resolutions, covenants. It will be up to Clea to interpret my silence according to her own needs and desires, to come to me if she has need or not, as the case may be. Does not everything* depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?

So that….

WORKPOINTS Landscape-tones: steep skylines, low cloud, pearl ground with shadows in oyster and violet. Accidie. On the lake gunmetal and lemon. Summer: sand lilac sky. Autumn: swollen bruise greys.

Winter: freezing white sand, clear skies, magnificent starscapes.

* * * character-squeezes Sveva Magnani: pertness, malcontent.

Gaston Pombal: honey-bear, fleshly opiates.

Teresa di Petromonti: farded Berenice.

Ptolomeo Dandolo: astronomer, astrologer, Zen.

Fuad El Said: black moon-pearl.

Josh Scobie: piracy.

Justine Hosnani: arrow in darkness.

Clea Montis: still waters of pain.

Gaston Phipps: nose like a sock, black hat.

Ahmed Zananiri: pole—star criminal.

Nessim Hosnani: smooth gloves, face frosted glass.

Melissa Artemis: patron of sorrow.

S. Balthazar: fables, work, unknowing.

* * * Pombal asleep in full evening dress. Beside him on the bed a chamberpot full of banknotes he had won at the Casino.

* * * Da Capo: ‘To bake in sensuality like an apple in its jacket.’

* * * Spoken impromptu by Gaston Phipps:

‘The lover like a cat with fish Longs to be off and will not share his dish.’

* * * Accident or attempted murder? Justine racing along the desert road to Cairo in the Rolls when suddenly the lights give out. Sightless, the great car swarms off the road and whistling like an arrow buries itself in a sand-dune. It looked as if the wires had been filed down to a thread. Nessim reached her within half an hour. They embrace in tears.

* * * Balthazar on Justine: ‘You will find that her formidable manner is constructed on a shaky edifice of childish timidities.’