The Alexandria Quartet (117 page)

I could feel the ambience of the city in me once more, its etiolated beauties spreading their tentacles out to grasp at my sleeve. I felt more summers coming, summers with fresh despairs, fresh onslaughts of the ‘bayonets of time.' My life would rot away afresh in stifling offices to the tepid whirl of electric fans, by the light of dusty unshaded bulbs hanging from the cracked ceilings of renovated tenements. At the Café Al Aktar, seated before a green
menthe
, listening to the sulky bubbles in the
narguilehs
I would have time to catechize the silences which followed the cries of the hawkers and the clatter of backgammon-boards. Still the same phantoms would pass and repass in the Nebi Daniel, the gleaming limousines of the bankers would bear their choice freight of painted ladies to distant bridge-tables, to the synagogue, the fortune-teller, the smart café. Once all this had power to wound. And now? Snatches of a quartet squirted from a café with scarlet awnings reminded me of Clea once saying: ‘Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.' But if I walked here with attention and even a certain tenderness it was because for me the city was something which I myself had deflowered, at whose hands I had learned to ascribe some particular meaning to fortune. These patched and faded walls, the lime wash cracking into a million oyster-coloured patches, only imitated the skins of the lepers who whined here on the edge of the Arab quarter; it was simply the hide of the place itself, peeling and caking away under the sun.

Even the war had come to terms with the city, had indeed stimulated its trade with its bands of aimless soldiers walking about with that grim air of unflinching desperation with which AngloSaxons embark upon their pleasures; their own demagnetized women were all in uniform now which gave them a ravenous air — as if they could drink the blood of the innocents while it was still warm. The brothels had overflowed and gloriously engulfed a whole quarter of the town around the old square. If anything the war had brought an air of tipsy carnival rather than anything else; even the nightly bombardments of the harbour were brushed aside by day, shrugged away like nightmares, hardly remembered as more than an inconvenience. For the rest, nothing had fundamentally changed. The brokers still sat on the steps of the Mohammed Ali club sipping their newspapers. The old horse-drawn gharries still clopped about upon their listless errands. The crowds still thronged the white Corniche to take the frail spring sunlight. Balconies crowded with wet linen and tittering girls. The Alexandrians still moved inside the murex-tinted cyclorama of the life they imagined. (‘Life is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagine'.) Voices of girls, stabbing of Arab quarter-tones, and from the synagogue a metallic drone punctuated by the jingle of a sistrum. On the floor of the Bourse they were screaming like one huge animal in pain. The money-changers were arranging their currencies like sweets upon the big squared boards. Pashas in scarlet flower-pots reclining in immense cars like gleaming sarcophagi. A dwarf playing a mandolin. An immense eunuch with a carbuncle the size of a brooch eating pastry. A legless man propped on a trolley, dribbling. In all this furious acceleration of the mind I thought suddenly of Clea — her thick eyelashes fragmenting every glance of the magnificent eyes — and wondered vaguely when she would appear. But in the meantime my straying footsteps had led me back to the narrow opening of the Rue Lepsius, to the worm-eaten room with the cane chair which creaked all night, and where once the old poet of the city had recited ‘The Barbarians'. I felt the stairs creak again under my tread. On the door was a notice in Arabic which said ‘Silence'. The latch was hooked back.

Balthazar's voice sounded strangely thin and far away as he bade me to enter. The shutters were drawn and the room was shrouded in half-darkness. He was lying in bed. I saw with a considerable shock that his hair was quite white which made him look like an ancient version of himself. It took me a moment or two to realize that it was not dyed. But how he had changed! One cannot exclaim to a friend: ‘My God, how much you have aged!' Yet this is what I almost did, quite involuntarily.

‘Darley!' he said feebly, and held up in welcome hands swollen to the size of boxing-gloves by the bandages which swathed them.

‘What on earth have you been doing to yourself?'

He drew a long sad sigh of vexation and nodded towards a chair. The room was in great disorder. A mountain of books and papers on the floor by the window. An unemptied chamberpot. A chessboard with the pieces all lying in confusion. A newspaper. A cheese-roll on a plate with an apple. The washbasin full of dirty plates. Beside him in a glass of some cloudy fluid stood a glittering pair of false teeth on which his feverish eye dwelt from time to time with confused perplexity. ‘You have heard nothing? That surprises me. Bad news, news of a scandal, travels so fast and so far I should have thought that by now you had heard. It is a long story. Shall I tell you and provoke the look of tactful commiseration with which Mountolive sits down to play chess with me every afternoon?'

‘But your hands.…'

‘I shall come to those in due course. It was a little idea I got from your manuscript. But the real culprits are these, I think, these false teeth in the glass. Don't they glitter bewitchingly? I am sure it was the teeth which set me off. When I found that I was about to lose my teeth I suddenly began to behave like a woman at the change of life. How else can I explain falling in love like a youth?' He cauterized the question with a dazed laugh.

‘First the Cabal — which is now disbanded; it went the way of all words. Mystagogues arose, theologians, all the resourceful bigotry that heaps up around a sect and spells dogma! But the thing had to me a special meaning, a mistaken and unconscious meaning, but nevertheless a clear one. I thought that slowly, by degrees, I should be released from the bondage of my appetites, of the flesh. I should at last, I felt, find a philosophic calm and balance which would expunge the passional nature, sterilize my actions. I thought of course that I had no
such préjugés
at the time; that my quest for truth was quite pure. But unconsciously I was using the Cabal to this precise end — instead of letting it use me. First miscalculation! Pass me some water from the pitcher over there.' He drank thirstily through his new pink gums. ‘Now comes the absurdity. I found I must lose my teeth. This caused the most frightful upheaval. It seemed to me like a death-sentence, like a confirmation of growing old, of getting beyond the reach of life itself. I have always been fastidious about mouths, always hated rank breath and coated tongues; but most of all false teeth! Unconsciously, then, I must have somehow pushed myself to this ridiculous thing — as if it were a last desperate fling before old age settled over me. Don't laugh. I
fell in love
in a way that I have never done before, at least not since I was eighteen. “Kisses sharp as quills” says the proverb; or as Pursewarden might say “Once more the cunning gonads on the prowl, the dragnet of the seed, the old biological terror”. But my dear Darley this was no joke. I still had my own teeth! But the object of my choice, a Greek actor, was the most disastrous that anyone could hit upon. To look like a god, to have a charm like a shower of silver arrows — and yet to be simply a small-spirited, dirty, venal and empty personage: that was Panagiotis! I knew it. It seemed to make no difference whatsoever. I saw in him the personage of Seleucia on whom Cavafy based his poem.* I cursed myself in the mirror. But I was powerless to behave otherwise. And, in truth, all this might have passed off as so much else had he not pushed me to outrageous jealousies, terrific scenes of recrimination. I remember that old Pursewarden used to say: “Ah! you Jews, you have the knack of suffering” and I used to reply with a quotation from Mommsen about the bloody Celts: “They have shaken all states and founded none. They nowhere created a great state or developed a distinctive culture of their own.” No, this was not simply an expression of minority-fever: this was the sort of murderous passion of which one has read, and for which our city is famous! Within a matter of months I became a hopeless drunkard. I was always found hanging about the brothels he frequented. I obtained drugs under prescription for him to sell. Anything, lest he should leave me. I became as weak as a woman. A terrific scandal, rather a series of them, made my practice dwindle until it is now nonexistent. Amaril is keeping the clinic going out of kindness until I can pick myself off the floor. I was dragged across the floor of the club, holding on to his coat and imploring him not to leave me! I was knocked down in Rue Fuad, thrashed with a cane outside the French Consulate. I found myself surrounded by long-faced and concerned friends who did everything they could to avert disaster. Useless. I had become quite impossible! All this went on, this ferocious life — and really I enjoyed being debased in a queer way, being whipped and scorned, reduced to a wreck! It was as if I wanted to swallow the world, to drain the sore of love until it healed. I was pushed to the very extremity of myself, yet I myself was doing the pushing: or was it the teeth?' He cast a sulky furious look in their direction and sighed, moving his head about as if with inner anguish at the memory of these misdeeds.

‘It is strange to what extent small inanimate objects can sometimes be responsible for the complete breakdown of an affective field; a love based on an eye-tooth, a disgust fathered by short-sight, a passion founded on hairy wrists. It was the green fingerstall that disgusted him finally. He could not bear to feel a hand moving on his body whose index finger was sheathed in a fingerstall. Yet I had to wear it, for my finger had begun to suppurate again; you know I have a little patch of eczema which plays me up from time to time, usually when I am run down or over-excited. It even manages to burst through the thick scab of methylene blue. I tried everything, but without avail. Perhaps unconsciously I was courting his disgust as an adolescent might with an acne? Who can say?

‘Then of course it came to an end, as everything does, even presumably life! There is no merit in suffering as I did, dumbly like a pack animal, galled by intolerable sores it cannot reach with its tongue. It was then that I remembered a remark in your manuscript about the ugliness of my hands. Why did I not cut them off and throw them in the sea as you had so thoughtfully recommended? This was the question that arose in my mind. At the time I was so numb with drugs and drink that I did not imagine I would feel anything. However I made an attempt, but it is harder than you imagine, all that gristle! I was like those fools who cut their throats and come bang up against the oesophagus. They always live. But when I desisted with pain I thought of another writer, Petronius. (The part that literature plays in our lives!) I lay down in a hot bath. But the blood wouldn't run, or perhaps I had no more. The colour of bitumen it seemed, the few coarse drops I persuaded to trickle. I was about to try other ways of alleviating the pain when Amaril appeared at his most abusive and brought me to my senses by giving me a deep sedation of some twenty hours during which he tidied up my corpse as well as my room. Then I was very ill, with shame I believe. Yes, it was chiefly shame, though of course I was much weakened by the absurd excess to which I had been pushed. I submitted to Pierre Balbz who removed the teeth and provided me with this set of glittering snappers —
art nouveau
! Amaril tried in his clumsy way to analyse me — but what is one to say of this very approximate science which has carelessly overflowed into anthropology on one side, theology on the other? There is much they do not know as yet: for instance that one kneels in church because one kneels to enter a woman, or that circumcision is derived from the clipping of the vine, without which it will run to leaf and produce no fruit! I had no philosophic system on which to lean as even Da Capo did. Do you remember Capodistria's exposition of the nature of the universe? “The world is a biological phenomenon which will only come to an end when every single man has had all the women, every woman all the men. Clearly this will take some time. Meanwhile there is nothing to do but to help forward the forces of nature by treading the grapes as hard as we can. As for an afterlife — what will it consist of but satiety? The play of shadows in Paradise — pretty
hanoums
flitting across the screens of memory, no longer desired, no longer desiring to be desired. Both at rest at last. But clearly it cannot be done all at once. Patience!
Avanti!”
Yes, I did a lot of slow and careful thinking as I lay here, listening to the creak of the cane chair and the noises from the street. My friends were very good and often visited me with gifts and conversations that left me headaches. So I gradually began to swim up to the surface again, with infinite slowness. I said to myself “Life is the master. We have been living against the grain of our intellects. The real teacher is endurance.” I had learned something, but at what a cost!

‘If only I had had the courage to tackle my love wholeheartedly I would have served the ideas of the Cabal better. A paradox, you think? Perhaps. Instead of letting my love poison my intellect and my intellectual reservations my love. Yet though I am rehabilitated and ready once more to enter the world, everything in nature seems to have disappeared! I still awake crying out: “He has gone away forever. True lovers exist for the sake of love.”'

He gave a croaky sob and crawled out from between the sheets, looking ridiculous in his long woollen combinations, to hunt for a handkerchief in the chest of drawers. To the mirror he said: ‘The most tender, the most tragic of illusions is perhaps to believe that our actions can add or subtract from the total quantity of good and evil in the world.' Then he shook his head gloomily and returned to his bed, settling the pillows at his back and adding: ‘And that fat brute Father Paul talks of acceptance! Acceptance of the world can only come from a full recognition of its measureless extents of good and evil; and to really inhabit it, explore it to the full uninhibited extent of this finite human understanding — that is all that is necessary in order to accept it. But what a task! One lies here with time passing and wonders about it. Every sort of time trickling through the hour-glass, “time immemorial” and “for the time being” and “time out of mind”; the time of the poet, the philosopher, the pregnant woman, the calendar.… Even “time is money” comes into the picture; and then, if you think that money is excrement for the Freudian, you understand that time must be also! Darley you have come at the right moment, for I am to be rehabilitated tomorrow by my friends. It was a touching thought which Clea first had. The shame of having to put in a public appearance again after all my misdeeds has been weighing on me very heavily. How to face the city again — that is the problem. It is only in moments like this that you realize who your friends are. Tomorrow a little group is coming here to find me dressed, my hands less conspicuously bandaged, my new teeth in place. I shall of course wear dark glasses. Mountolive, Amaril, Pombal and Clea, two on each arm. We will walk the whole length of Rue Fuad thus and take a lengthy public coffee on the pavement outside Pastroudi. Mountolive has booked the largest lunch table at the Mohammed Ali and proposes to offer me a lunch of twenty people to celebrate my resurrection from the dead. It is a wonderful gesture of solidarity, and will certainly quell spiteful tongues and sneers. In the evening the Cervonis have asked me to dinner. With such lucky help I feel I may be able in the long run to repair my damaged confidence and that of my old patients. Is it not fine of them — and in the traditions of the city? I may live to smile again, if not to love — a fixed and glittering smile which only Pierre will gaze at with affection — the affection of the artificer for his handiwork.' He raised his white boxing-gloves like a champion entering the ring and grimly saluted an imaginary crowd. Then he flopped back on his pillows once more and gazed at me with an air of benign sorrow.