The Alexandria Quartet (12 page)

A few such sketches comprise the whole portrait of the author of
Moeurs
; it seems a meagre and disappointing reward for so much painstaking and loving observation; nor can I trace one word about their separation after this brief and fruitless marriage But it was interesting to see from his book how he had made the same judgements upon her character as we were later to make, Nessim and I. The compliance she extorted from us all was the astonishing thing about her. It was as if men knew at once that they were in the presence of someone who could not be judged according to the standards they had hitherto employed in thinking about women. Clea once said of her (and her judgements were seldom if ever charitable): ‘The true whore is man's real darling — like Justine; she alone has the capacity to wound men. But of course our friend is only a shallow twentieth-century reproduction of the great
hetairae
of the past, the type to which she belongs without knowing it, Lais, Charis and the rest.… Justine's role has been taken from her and on her shoulders society has placed the burden of guilt to add to her troubles. It is a pity. For she is truly Alexandrian.'

For Clea too the little book of Arnauti upon Justine seemed shallow and infected by the desire to explain everything. ‘It is our disease' she said ‘to want to contain everything within the frame of reference of a psychology or a philosophy. After all Justine cannot be justified or excused. She simply and magnificently
is
; we have to put up with her, like original sin. But to call her a nymphomaniac or to try and Freudianise her, my dear, takes away all her mythical substance — the only thing she really is. Like all amoral people she verges on the Goddess. If our world were a world there would be temples to accommodate her where she would find the peace she was seeking. Temples where one could outgrow the sort of inheritance she has: not these damn monasteries full of pimply little Catholic youths who have made a bicycle saddle of their sexual organs.'

She was thinking of the chapters which Arnauti has entitled
The Check
, and in which he thinks he has found the clue to Justine's instability of heart. They may be, as Clea thinks, shallow, but since everything is susceptible of more than one explanation they are worth consideration. I myself do not feel that they explain Justine, but to a degree they do illuminate her actions — those immense journeys they undertook together across the length and breadth of Europe. ‘In the very heart of passion' he writes, adding in parentheses ‘(passion which to her seemed the most facile of gifts) there was a check — some great impediment of feeling which I became aware of only after many months. It rose up between us like a shadow and I recognized, or thought I did, the true enemy of the happiness which we longed to share and from which we felt ourselves somehow excluded. What was it?

‘She told me one night as we lay in that ugly great bed in a rented room — a gaunt rectangular room of a vaguely French-Levantine shape and flavour: a stucco ceiling covered with decomposing cherubs and posies of vine-leaves. She told me and left me raging with a jealousy I struggled to hide — but a jealousy of an entirely novel sort. Its object was a man who though still alive,
no longer existed
. It is perhaps what the Freudians would call a screen-memory of incidents in her earliest youth. She had (and there was no mistaking the force of this confession for it was accompanied by floods of tears, and I have never seen her weep like that before or since) — she had been raped by one of her relations. One cannot help smiling at the commonplaceness of the thought. It was impossible to judge at what age. Nevertheless — and here I thought I had penetrated to the heart of the Check: from this time forward she could obtain no satisfaction in love unless she mentally recreated these incidents and re-enacted them. For her we, her lovers, had become only mental substitutes for this first childish act — so that love, as a sort of masturbation, took on all the colours of neurasthenia; she was suffering from an imagination dying of anaemia, for she could possess no one thoroughly in the flesh. She could not appropriate to herself the love she felt she needed, for her satisfactions derived from the crepuscular corners of a life she was no longer living. This was passionately interesting. But what was even more amusing was that I felt this blow to my
amour propre
as a man exactly as if she had confessed to an act of deliberate unfaithfulness. What! Every time she lay in my arms she could find no satisfaction save through this memory? In a way, then, I could not possess her: had never done so. I was merely a dummy. Even now as I write I cannot help smiling to remember the strangled voice in which I asked who the man was, and where he was. (What did I hope to do? Challenge him to a duel?) Nevertheless there he was, standing squarely between Justine and I; between Justine and the light of the sun.

‘But here too I was sufficiently detached to observe how much love feeds upon jealousy, for as a woman out of my reach yet in my arms, she became ten times more desirable, more necessary. It was a heartbreaking predicament for a man who had no intention of falling in love, and for a woman who only wished to be delivered of an obsession and set free to love. From this something else followed: if I could break the Check I could possess her truly, as no man had possessed her. I could step into the place of the shadow and receive her kisses truly; now they fell upon a corpse. It seemed to me that I understood everything now.

‘This explains the grand tour we took, hand in hand so to speak, in order to overcome this succubus together with help of science. Together we visited the book-lined cell of Czechnia, where the famous mandarin of psychology sat, gloating pallidly over his specimens. Basle, Zurich, Baden, Paris — the flickering of steel rails over the arterial systems of Europe's body: steel ganglia meeting and dividing away across mountains and valleys. Confronting one's face in the pimpled mirrors of the Orient Express. We carried her disease backwards and forwards over Europe like a baby in a cradle until I began to despair, and even to imagine that perhaps Justine did not wish to be cured of it. For to the involuntary check of the psyche she added another — of the will. Why this should be I cannot understand; but she would tell no one his name, the shadow's name. A name which by now could mean everything or nothing to her. After all, somewhere in the world he must be now, his hair thinning and greying from business worries or excesses, wearing a black patch over one eye as he did always after an attack of ophthalmia. (If I can describe him to you it is because once I actually saw him.) “Why should I tell people his name?” Justine used to cry. “He is nothing to me now — has never been. He has completely forgotten these incidents. Don't you see he is dead? When I see him.…” This was like being stung by a serpent. “So you do see him?” She immediately withdrew to a safer position. “Every few years, passing in the street. We just nod.”

‘So this creature, this pattern of ordinariness, was still breathing, still alive! How fantastic and ignoble jealousy is. But jealousy for a figment of a lover's imagination borders on the ludicrous.

‘Then once, in the heart of Cairo, during a traffic jam, in the breathless heat of a midsummer night, a taxi drew up beside ours and something in Justine's expression drew my gaze in the direction of hers. In that palpitant moist heat, dense from the rising damp of the river and aching with the stink of rotten fruit, jasmine and sweating black bodies, I caught sight of the very ordinary man in the taxi next to us. Apart from the black patch over one eye there was nothing to distinguish him from the thousand other warped and seedy business men of this horrible city. His hair was thinning, his profile sharp, his eye beady: he was wearing a grey summer suit. Justine's expression of suspense and anguish was so marked however that involuntarily I cried: “What is it?”; and as the traffic block lifted and the cab moved off she replied with a queer flushed light in her eye, an air almost of drunken daring: “The man you have all been hunting for.” But before the words were out of her mouth I had understood and as if in a bad dream stopped our own taxi and leaped out into the road. I saw the red tail light of his taxi turning into Sulieman Pacha, too far away for me even to be able to distinguish its colour or number. To give chase was impossible for the traffic behind us was dense once more. I got back into the taxi trembling and speechless. So this was the man for whose name Freud had hunted with all the great might of his loving detachment. For this innocent middle-aged man Justine had lain suspended, every nerve tense as if in the act of levitation, while the thin steely voice of Magnani had repeated over and over again: “Tell me his name; you must tell me his name”; while from the forgotten prospects where her memory lay confined her voice repeated like an oracle of the machine-age: “I cannot remember. I cannot remember.”

‘It seemed to me clear then that in some perverted way she did not wish to conquer the Check, and certainly all the power of the physicians could not persuade her. This was the bare case without orchestration, and here lay the so-called nymphomania with which these reverend gentlemen assured me that she was afflicted. At times I felt convinced that they were right; at others I doubted. Nevertheless it was tempting to see in her behaviour the excuse that every man held out for her the promise of a release in her passional self, release from this suffocating self-enclosure where sex could only be fed by the fat flames of fantasy.

‘Perhaps we did wrong in speaking of it openly, of treating it as a problem, for this only invested her with a feeling of self-importance and moreover contributed a nervous hesitation to her which until then had been missing. In her passional life she was direct — like an axe falling. She took kisses like so many coats of paint. I am puzzled indeed to remember how long and how vainly I searched for excuses which might make her amorality if not palatable at least understandable. I realize now how much time I wasted in this way; instead of enjoying her and turning aside from these preoccupations with the thought: “She is as untrustworthy as she is beautiful. She takes love as plants do water, lightly, thoughtlessly.” Then I could have walked arm in arm with her by the rotting canal, or sailed on sundrenched Mareotis, enjoying her as she was, taking her as she was. What a marvellous capacity for unhappiness we writers have! I only know that this long and painful examination of Justine succeeded not only in making her less sure of herself, but also more consciously dishonest; worst of all, , she began to look upon me as an enemy who watched for the least misconstruction, the least word or gesture which might give her away. She was doubly on her guard, and indeed began to accuse me of an insupportable jealousy. Perhaps she was right. I remember her saying: “You live now among my imaginary intimacies. I was a fool to tell you everything, to be so honest. Look at the way you question me now. Several days running the same questions. And at the slightest discrepancy you are on me. You know I never tell a story the same way twice. Does that mean that I am lying?”

‘I was not warned by this but redoubled my efforts to penetrate the curtain behind which I thought my adversary stood, a black patch over one eye. I was still in correspondence with Magnani and tried to collect as much evidence as possible which might help him elucidate the mystery, but in vain. In the thorny jungle of guilty impulses which constitute the human psyche who can find a way — even when the subject wishes to co-operate? The time we wasted upon futile researches into her likes and dislikes! If Justine had been blessed with a sense of humour what fun she could have had with us. I remember a whole correspondence based upon the confession that she could not read the words “Washington D.C.” on a letter without a pang of disgust! It is a matter of deep regret to me now that I wasted this time when I should have been loving her as she deserved. Some of these doubts must also have afflicted old Magnani for I recall him writing: “and my dear boy we must never forget that this infant science we are working at, which seems so full of miracles and promises, is at best founded on much that is as shaky as astrology. After all, these important
names
we give to things! Nymphomania may be considered another form of virginity if you wish; and as for Justine, she may never have been in love. Perhaps one day she will meet a man before whom all these tiresome chimeras will fade into innocence again. You must not rule this thought out”. He was not, of course, trying to hurt me — for this was a thought I did not care to admit to myself. But it penetrated me when I read it in this wise old man's letter.'

I had not read these pages of Arnauti before the afternoon at Bourg El Arab when the future of our relationship was compromised by the introduction of a new element — I do not dare to use the word love, for fear of hearing that harsh sweet laugh in my imagination: a laugh which would somewhere be echoed by the diarist. Indeed so fascinating did I find his analysis of his subject, and so closely did our relationship echo the relationship he had enjoyed with Justine that at times I too felt like some paper character out of
Moeurs
. Moreover, here I am, attempting to do the same sort of thing with her in words — though I lack his ability and have no pretensions to being an artist. I want to put things down simply and crudely, without style — the plaster and whitewash; for the portrait of Justine should be rough-cast, with the honest stonework of the predicament showing through.