The Alexandria Quartet (13 page)

After the episode of the beach we did not meet for some small time, both of us infected by a vertiginous uncertainty — or at least I was. Nessim was called away to Cairo on business but though Justine was, as far as I knew, at home alone, I could not bring myself to visit the studio. Once as I passed I heard the Blüthner and was tempted to ring the bell — so sharply defined was the image of her at the black piano. Then once passing the garden at night I saw someone — it must have been she — walking by the lily-pond, shading a candle in the palm of one hand. I stood for a moment uncertainly before the great doors wondering whether to ring or not. Melissa at this time also had taken the occasion to visit a friend in Upper Egypt. Summer was growing apace, and the town was sweltering. I bathed as often as my work permitted, travelling to the crowded beaches in the little tin tram.

Then one day while I was lying in bed with a temperature brought on by an overdose of the sun Justine walked into the dank calm of the little flat, dressed in a white frock and shoes, and carrying a rolled towel under one arm with her handbag. The magnificence of her dark skin and hair glowed out of all this whiteness with an arresting quickness. When she spoke her voice was harsh and unsteady, and it sounded for a moment as if she had been drinking — perhaps she had. She put one hand out and leaned upon the mantelshelf as she said: ‘I want to put an end to all this as soon as possible. I feel as if we've gone too far to go back.' As for me I was consumed by a terrible sort of desirelessness, a luxurious anguish of body and mind which prevented me from saying anything, thinking anything. I could not visualize the act of love with her, for somehow the emotional web we had woven about each other stood between us; an invisible cobweb of loyalties, ideas, hesitations which I had not the courage to brush aside. As she took a step forward I said feebly: ‘This bed is so awful and smelly. I have been drinking. I tried to make love to myself but it was no good — I kept thinking about you.' I felt myself turning pale as I lay silent upon my pillows, all at once conscious of the silence of the little flat which was torn in one corner by the dripping of a leaky tap. A taxi brayed once in the distance, and from the harbour, like the stifled roar of a minotaur, came a single dark whiff of sound from a siren. Now it seemed we were completely alone together.

The whole room belonged to Melissa — the pitiful dressing-table full of empty powder-boxes and photos: the graceful curtain breathing softly in that breathless afternoon air like the sail of a ship. How often had we not lain in one another's arms watching the slow intake and recoil of that transparent piece of bright linen? Across all this, the image of someone dearly loved, held in the magnification of a gigantic tear moved the brown harsh body of Justine naked. It would have been blind of me not to notice how deeply her resolution was mixed with sadness. We lay eye to eye for a long time, our bodies touching, hardly communicating more than the animal lassitude of that vanishing afternoon. I could not help thinking then as I held her tightly in the crook of an arm how little we own our bodies. I thought of the words of Arnauti when he says: ‘It dawned on me then that in some fearful way this girl had shorn me of all my
force morale
. I felt as if I had had my head shaved.' But the French, I thought, with their endless gravitation between
bonheur
and
chagrin
must inevitably suffer when they come up against something which does not admit of
préjugés;
born for tactics and virtuosity, not for staying-power, they lack the little touch of crassness which armours the Anglo-Saxon mind. And I thought: ‘Good. Let her lead me where she will. She will find me a match for her. And there'll be no talk of
chagrin
at the end.' Then I thought of Nessim, who was watching us (though I did not know) as if through the wrong end of an enormous telescope: seeing our small figures away on the skyline of his own hopes and plans. I was anxious that he should not be hurt.

But she had closed her eyes — so soft and lustrous now, as if polished by the silence which lay so densely all around us. Her trembling fingers had become steady and at ease upon my shoulder. We turned to each other, closing like the two leaves of a door upon the past, shutting out everything, and I felt her happy spontaneous kisses begin to compose the darkness around us like successive washes of a colour. When we had made love and lay once more awake she said: ‘I am always so bad the first time, why is it?'

‘Nerves perhaps. So am I.'

‘You are a little afraid of me.'

Then rising on an elbow as if I had suddenly woken up I said: ‘But Justine, what on earth are we going to make of all this? If this is to be —' But she became absolutely terrified now and put her hand over my mouth, saying: ‘For God's sake, no justifications! Then I shall know we are wrong! For nothing can justify it, nothing. And yet it has got to be like this.' And getting out of bed she walked over to the dressing-table with its row of photos and powder-boxes and with a single blow like that of a leopard's paw swept it clean.
‘That'
she said ‘is what I am doing to Nessim and you to Melissa! It would be ignoble to try and pretend otherwise.' This was more in the tradition that Arnauti had led me to expect and I said nothing. She turned now and started kissing me with such a hungry agony that my burnt shoulders began to throb until tears came into my eyes. ‘Ah!' she said softly and sadly. ‘You are crying. I wish I could. I have lost the knack.'

I remember thinking to myself as I held her, tasting the warmth and sweetness of her body, salt from the sea — her earlobes tasted of salt — I remember thinking: ‘Every kiss will take her near Nessim, but separate me further from Melissa.' But strangely enough I experienced no sense of despondency or anguish; and for her part she must have been thinking along the same lines for she suddenly said: ‘Balthazar says that the natural traitors — like you and I — are really Caballi. He says we are dead and live this life as a sort of limbo. Yet the living can't do without us. We infect them with a desire to experience more, to grow.'

I tried to tell myself how stupid all this was — a banal story of an adultery which was among the cheapest commonplaces of the city: and how it did not deserve romantic or literary trappings. And yet somewhere else, at a deeper level, I seemed to recognize that the experience upon which I had embarked would have the deathless finality of a lesson learned. ‘You are too serious' I said, with a certain resentment, for I was vain and did not like the sensation of being carried out of my depth. Justine turned her great eyes on me. ‘Oh no!' she said softly, as if to herself ‘It would be silly to spread so much harm as I have done and not to realize that it is my role. Only in this way, by knowing what I am doing, can I ever outgrow myself. It isn't easy to be me. I
so much
want to be responsible for myself. Please never doubt that.'

We slept, and I was only woken by the dry click of Hamid's key turning in the lock and by his usual evening performance. For a pious man, whose little prayer mat lay rolled and ready to hand on the kitchen balcony, he was extraordinarily superstitious. He was as Pombal said, ‘djinn-ridden', and there seemed to be a djinn in every corner of the flat. How tired I had become of hearing his muttered ‘
Destoor, destoor
', as he poured slops down the kitchen sink — for here dwelt a powerful djinn and its pardon had to be invoked. The bathroom too was haunted by them, and I could always tell when Hamid used the outside lavatory (which he had been forbidden to do) because whenever he sat on the water-closet a hoarse involuntary invocation escaped his lips (‘Permission O ye blessed ones!') which neutralized the djinn which might otherwise have dragged him down into the sewage system. Now I heard him shuffling round the kitchen in his old felt slippers like a boa-constrictor muttering softly.

I woke Justine from a troubled doze and explored her mouth and eyes and fine hair with the anguished curiosity which for me has always been the largest part of sensuality. ‘We must be going' I said. ‘Pombal will be coming back from the Consulate in a little while.'

I recall the furtive languor with which we dressed and silent as accomplices made our way down the gloomy staircase into the street. We did not dare to link arms, but our hands kept meeting involuntarily as we walked, as if they had not shaken off the spell of the afternoon and could not bear to be separated. We parted speechlessly too, in the little square with its dying trees burnt to the colour of coffee by the sun; parted with only one look — as if we wished to take up emplacements in each other's mind forever.

It was as if the whole city had crashed about my ears; I walked about in it aimlessly as survivors must walk about the streets of their native city after an earthquake, amazed to find how much that had been familiar was changed. I felt in some curious way deafened and remember nothing more except that much later I ran into Pursewarden and Pombal in a bar, and that the former recited some lines from the old poet's famous ‘The City' which struck me with a new force — as if the poetry had been newly minted: though I knew them well. And when Pombal said: ‘You are abstracted this evening. What is the matter?' I felt like answering him in the words of the dying Amr:* ‘I feel as if heaven lay close upon the earth and I between them both, breathing through the eye of a needle.'

PART II

T
o have written so much and to have said nothing about Balthazar is indeed an omission — for in a sense he is one of the keys to the City. The key: Yes, I took him very much as he was in those days and now in my memory I feel that he is in need of a new evaluation. There was much that I did not understand then, much that I have since learned. I remember chiefly those interminable evenings spent at the Café Al Aktar playing backgammon while he smoked his favourite Lakadif in a pipe with a long stem. If Mnemjian is the archives of the City, Balthazar is its Platonic
daimon
— the mediator between its Gods and its men. It sounds far-fetched, I know.

I see a tall man in a black hat with a narrow brim. Pombal christened him ‘the botanical goat'. He is thin, stoops slightly, and has a deep croaking voice of great beauty, particularly when he quotes or recites. In speaking to you he never looks at you directly — a trait which I have noticed in many homosexuals. But in him this does not signify inversion, of which he is not only not ashamed, but to which he is actually indifferent; his yellow goat-eyes are those of a hypnotist. In not looking at you he is sparing you from a regard so pitiless that it would discountenance you for an evening. It is a mystery how he can have, suspended from his trunk, hands of such monstrous ugliness. I would long since have cut them off and thrown them into the sea. Under his chin he has one dark spur of hair growing, such as one sometimes sees upon the hoof of a sculptured Pan.

Several times in the course of those long walks we took together, beside the sad velvet broth of the canal, I found myself wondering what was the quality in him which arrested me. This was before I knew anything about the Cabal. Though he reads widely Balthazar's conversation is not heavily loaded with the kind of material that might make one think him bookish: like Pursewarden. He loves poetry, parable, science and sophistry — but there is a lightness of touch and a judgement behind his thinking. Yet underneath the lightness there is something else — a resonance which gives his thinking density. His vein is aphoristic, and it sometimes gives him the touch of a minor oracle. I see now that he was one of those rare people who had found a philosophy for himself and whose life was occupied in trying to live it. I think this is the unanalysed quality which gives his talk cutting-edge.

As a doctor he spends much of his working-time in the government clinic for venereal disease. (He once said dryly: ‘I live at the centre of the city's life — its genito-urinary system: it is a sobering sort of place.') Then, too, he is the only man whose paederasty is somehow no qualification of his innate masculinity of mind. He is neither a puritan nor its opposite. Often I have entered his little room in the Rue Lepsius — the one with the creaking cane chair — and found him asleep in bed with a sailor. He has neither excused himself at such a time nor even alluded to his bedfellow. While dressing he will sometimes turn and tenderly tuck the sheet round his partner's sleeping form. I take this naturalness as a compliment.

He is a strange mixture; at times I have heard his voice tremble with emotion as he alludes to some aspect of the Cabal which he has been trying to make comprehensible to the study-group. Yet once when I spoke enthusiastically of some remarks he had made he sighed and said, with that perfect Alexandrian scepticism which somehow underlay an unquestionable belief in and devotion to the Gnosis: ‘We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.' At another time after a long and tiresome argument with Justine about heredity and environment he said: ‘Ah! my dear, after all the work of the philosophers on his soul and the doctors on his body, what can we say we really know about man? That he is, when all is said and done, just a passage for liquids and solids, a pipe of flesh.'

He had been a fellow-student and close friend of the old poet, and of him he spoke with such warmth and penetration that what he had to say always moved me. ‘I sometimes think that I learned more from studying him than I did from studying philosophy. His exquisite balance of irony and tenderness would have put him among the saints had he been a religious man. He was by divine choice only a poet and often unhappy but with him one had the feeling that he was catching every minute as it flew and turning it upside down to expose its happy side. He was really using himself up, his inner self, in living. Most people lie and let life play upon them like the tepid discharges of a douche-bag. To the Cartesian proposition: “I think, therefore I am”, he opposed his own, which must have gone something like this: “I imagine, therefore I belong and am free”.'