The Alexandria Quartet (122 page)

Thinking of such passages of savage insight — and they are many in that strange book — I would turn to the sleeping Clea and study her quiet profile in order to … to ingest her, drink the whole of her up without spilling a drop, mingle my very heartbeats with hers. ‘However near we would wish to be, so far exactly do we remain from each other' wrote Arnauti. It seemed to be no longer true of our condition. Or was I simply deluding myself once more, refracting truth by the disorders inherent in my own vision? Strangely enough I neither knew nor cared now; I had stopped rummaging through my own mind, had learned to take her like a clear draught of spring water.

‘Have you been watching me asleep?'

‘Yes.'

‘Unfair! But what thinking?'

‘Many things.'

‘Unfair to watch a sleeping woman, off her guard.'

‘Your eyes have changed colour again. Smoke.”

(A mouth whose paint blurred slightly under kisses. The two small commas, which were almost cusps, almost ready to turn into dimples when the lazy smiles broke surface. She stretches and places her arms behind her head, pushing back the helmet of fair hair which captures the sheen of the candle-light. In the past she had not possessed this authority over her own beauty. New gestures, new tendrils had grown, languorous yet adept to express this new maturity. A limpid sensuality which was now undivided by hesitations, self-questionings. A transformation of the old ‘silly goose' into this fine, indeed impressive, personage, quite at one with her own body and mind. How had this come about?)

I: ‘That commonplace book of Pursewarden's. How the devil did you come by it? I took it to the office today.'

She: ‘Liza. I asked her for something to remember him by. Absurd. As if one could forget the brute! He's everywhere. Did the notes startle you?'

I:
‘Yes
. It was as if he had appeared at my elbow. The first thing I fell upon was a description of my new chief, Maskelyne by name. It seems Pursewarden worked with him once. Shall I read it to you?'

She:'I know it.'

(‘Like most of my compatriots he had a large hand-illuminated sign hanging up on the front of his mind reading ON NO ACCOUNT DISTURB. At some time in the distant past he had been set going like a quartz clock. He will run his course unfaltering as a metronome. Do not let the pipe alarm you. It is intended to give a judicial air. White man smoke puff puff, white man ponder puff puff. In fact white man is deeply deeply asleep under the badges of office, the pipe, the nose, the freshly starched handkerchief sticking out of his sleeve.')

She: ‘Did you read it to Maskelyne?'

I: ‘Naturally not.'

She: ‘There are wounding things about all of us in it; perhaps that is why I took a fancy to it! I could hear the brute's voice as he uttered them. You know, my dear, I think I am the only person to have loved old Pursewarden for himself while he was alive. I got his wavelength. I loved him for himself, I say, because strictly he
had
no self. Of course he could be tiresome, difficult, cruel — like everyone else. But he exemplified something — a grasp on something. That is why his work will live and go on giving off light, so to speak. Light me a cigarette. He had cut a foothold in the cliff a bit higher than I could dare to go — the point where one looks at the top because one is afraid to look down! You tell me that Justine also says something like this. I suppose she got the same thing in a way — but I suspect her of being merely grateful to him, like an animal whose master pulls a thorn from its paw. His intuition was very feminine and much sharper than hers — and you know that women instinctively like a man with plenty of female in him;
there
, they suspect, is the only sort of lover who can sufficiently identify himself with them to … deliver them of being just women, catalysts, strops, oil-stones. Most of us have to be content to play the role of
machine à plaisir!'

I: ‘Why do you laugh, suddenly like that?'

She: ‘I was remembering making a fool of myself with Pursewarden. I suppose I should feel ashamed of it! You will see what he says about me in the notebook. He calls me “a juicy Hanoverian goose, the only truly kallipygous girl in the city”! I cannot think what possessed me, except that I was so worried about my painting. It had dried up on me. I couldn't get any further somehow, canvas gave me a headache. I finally decided that the question of my own blasted virginity was the root cause of the business. You know it is a terrible business to be a virgin — it is like not having one's Matric or Bac. You long to be delivered from it yet … at the same time this valuable experience should be with someone whom you care for, otherwise it will be without value to your inside self. Well, there I was, stuck. So with one of those characteristic strokes of fancy which in the past confirmed for everyone my stupidity I decided — guess what? To offer myself grimly to the only artist I knew I could trust, to put me out of my misery. Pursewarden, I thought, might have an understanding of my state and some consideration for my feelings. I'm amused to remember that I dressed myself up in a very heavy tweed costume and flat shoes, and wore dark glasses. I was timid, you see, as well as desperate. I walked up and down the corridor of the hotel outside his room for ages in despair and apprehension, my dark glasses firmly on my nose. He was inside. I could hear him whistling as he always did when he was painting a water colour; a maddening tuneless whistle! At last I burst in on him like a fireman into a burning building, startling him, and said with trembling lips: “I have come to ask you to
dépuceler
me, please, because I cannot get any further with my work unless you do.” I said it in French. It would have sounded dirty in English. He was startled. All sorts of conflicting emotions flitted across his face for a second. And then, as I burst into tears and sat down suddenly on a chair he threw his head back and roared with laughter. He laughed until the tears ran down his cheeks while I sat there in my dark glasses sniffing. Finally he collapsed exhausted on his bed and lay staring at the ceiling. Then he got up, put his arms on my shoulders, removed my glasses, kissed me, and put them back. Then he put his hands on his hips and laughed again. “My dear Clea” he said, “it would be anyone's dream to take you to bed, and I must confess that in a corner of my mind I have often allowed the thought to wander but … dearest angel, you have spoilt everything.
This
is no way to enjoy you, and no way for you to enjoy yourself. Forgive my laughing! You have effectively spoiled my dream. Offering yourself
this
way, without
wanting
me, is such an insult to my male vanity that I simply would not be able to comply with your demand. It is, I suppose, a compliment that you chose me rather than someone else — but my vanity is larger than that! In fact your request is like a pailful of slops emptied over my head! I shall always treasure the compliment and regret the refusal but … if only you had chosen some other way to do it, how glad I would have been to oblige! Why did you have to let me see that you really did not care for
me
?”

‘He blew his nose gravely in a corner of the sheet, took my glasses and placed them on his own nose to examine himself in the mirror. Then he came and stared at me until the comedy overflowed again and we both started laughing. I felt an awful sense of relief. And when I had repaired my damaged make-up in the mirror he allowed me to take him to dinner to discuss the problem of paint with magnificent, generous honesty. The poor man listened with such patience to my rigmarole! He said: “I can only tell you what I know, and it isn't much. First you have to know and understand intellectually what you want to do — then you have to sleep-walk a little to reach it. The real obstacle is oneself. I believe that artists are composed of vanity, indolence and self-regard. Work-blocks are caused by the swelling-up of the ego on one or all of these fronts. You get a bit scared about the imaginary importance of what you are doing! Mirror-worship. My solution would be to slap a poultice on the inflamed parts — tell your ego to go to hell and not make a misery of what should be essentially
fun, joy.”
He said many other things that evening, but I have forgotten the rest; but the funny thing was that just talking to him, just being talked to, seemed to clear the way ahead again. Next day he sent me a page of oracular notes about art.* I started work again, clear as a bell, the next morning. Perhaps in a funny sort of way he did
dépuceler
me? I regretted not being able to reward him as he deserved, but I realized that he was right. I would have to wait for a tide to turn. And this did not happen until later, in Syria. There was something bitter and definitive about it when it came, and I made the usual mistakes one makes from inexperience and paid for them. Shall I tell you?'

I: ‘Only if you wish.'

She: ‘I found myself suddenly and hopelessly entangled with someone I had admired some years before but never quite imagined in the context of a lover. Chance brought us together for a few short months. I think that neither of us had foreseen this sudden
coup de foudre
. We both caught fire, as if somewhere an invisible burning glass had been playing on us without our being aware. It is curious that an experience so wounding can also be recognized as good, as positively nourishing, I suppose I was even a bit eager to be wounded — or I would not have made the mistakes I did. He was somebody already committed to someone else, so there was never, from the beginning, any pretence of permanence in our liaison. Yet (and here comes my famous stupidity again) I very much wanted to have a child by him. A moment's thought would have shown me that it would have been impossible; but the moment's thought only supervened when I was already pregnant. I did not, I thought, care that he must go away, marry someone else. I would at least have his child! But when I confessed it — at the very moment the words left my lips — I suddenly woke up and realized that this would be to perpetuate a link with him to which I had no right. To put it plainly I should be taking advantage of him, creating a responsibility which would shackle him throughout his marriage. It came to me in a flash, and I swallowed my tongue. By the greatest luck he had not heard my words. He was lying like you are now, half asleep, and had not caught my whisper. “What did you say?” he said. I substituted another remark, made up on the spur of the moment. A month later he left Syria. It was a sunny day full of the sound of bees. I knew I should have to destroy the child. I bitterly regretted it, but there seemed no other honourable course to take in the matter. You will probably think I was wrong, but even now I am glad I took the course I did, for it would have perpetuated something which had no right to exist outside the span of these few golden months. Apart from that I had nothing to regret. I had been immeasurably grown-up by the experience. I was full of gratitude and still am. If I am generous now in my love-making it is perhaps because I am paying back the debt, refunding an old love in a new. I entered a clinic and went through with it. Afterwards the kindly old anaesthetist called me to the dirty sink to show me the little pale homunculus with its tiny members. I wept bitterly. It looked like a smashed yolk of an egg. The old man turned it over curiously with a sort of spatula — as one might turn over a rasher of bacon in a frying-pan. I could not match his cold scientific curiosity and felt rather sick. He smiled and said: “It is all over. How relieved you must feel!” It was true, with my sadness there was a very real relief at having done what I recognized as the right thing. Also a sense of loss; my heart felt like a burgled swallow's nest. And so back to the mountains, to the same easel and white canvas. It is funny but I realized that precisely what wounded me most as a woman nourished me most as an artist. But of course I missed him for a long time: just a physical being whose presence attaches itself without one's knowing, like a piece of cigarette paper to the lip. It hurts to pull it away. Bits of the skin come off! But hurt or not, I learned to bear it and even to cherish it, for it allowed me to come to terms with another illusion. Or rather to see the link between body and spirit in a new way — for the physique is only the outer periphery, the contours of the spirit, its solid part. Through smell, taste, touch we apprehend each other, ignite each other's minds; information conveyed by the body's odours after orgasm, breath, tongue-taste — through these one “knows” in quite primeval fashion. Here was a perfectly ordinary man with no exceptional gifts but in his elements, so to speak, how good for me; he gave off the odours of good natural objects: like newly , baked bread, roasting coffee, cordite, sandalwood. In this field of
rapport
I missed him like a skipped meal — I know it sounds vulgar! Paracelsus says that thoughts are acts. Of them all, I suppose, the sex act is the most important, the one in which our spirits most divulge themselves. Yet one feels it a sort of clumsy paraphrase of the poetic, the noetic,
thought
which shapes itself into a kiss or an embrace. Sexual love
is
knowledge, both in etymology and in cold fact; “he knew her” as the Bible says! Sex is the joint or coupling which unites the male and female ends of knowledge merely — a cloud of unknowing! When a culture goes bad in its sex all knowledge is impeded. We women know that. That was when I wrote to you asking if I should come to visit you in your island. How grateful I am that you did not answer me! It would have been a wrong move at the time. Your silence saved me! Ah! my dear, forgive me if I bore you with my wanderings for I see that you are looking somewhat sleepy! But with you it is such a pleasure to talk away the time between love-making! It is a novelty for me. Apart from you there is only dear Balthazar — whose rehabilitation, by the way, is going on apace. But he has told you? He has been inundated with invitations since the Mountolive banquet, and it seems will have little difficulty in rebuilding the clinic practice again.'