The Alexandria Quartet (4 page)

I wished I could imitate the self-confident directness with which Justine threaded her way through these streets towards the café where I waited for her: El Bab. The doorway by the shattered arch where in all innocence we sat and talked; but already our conversation had become impregnated by understandings which we took for the lucky omens of friendship merely. On that dun mud floor, feeling the quickly cooling cylinder of the earth dip towards the darkness, we were possessed only by a desire to communicate ideas and experiences which overstepped the range of thought normal to conversation among ordinary people. She talked like a man and I talked to her like a man. I can only remember the pattern and weight of these conversations, not their substance. And leaning there on a forgotten elbow, drinking the cheap
arak
and smiling at her, I inhaled the warm summer perfume of her dress and skin — a perfume which was called, I don't know why,
Jamais de la vie
.

These are the moments which possess the writer, not the lover, and which live on perpetually. One can return to them time and time again in memory, or use them as a fund upon which to build the part of one's life which is writing. One can debauch them with words, but one cannot spoil them. In this context too, I recover another such moment, lying beside a sleeping woman in a cheap room near the mosque. In that early spring dawn, with its dense dew, sketched upon the silence which engulfs a whole city before the birds awaken it, I caught the sweet voice of the blind
muezzin
from the mosque reciting the
Ebed
— a voice hanging like a hair in the palm-cooled upper airs of Alexandria. ‘I praise the perfection of God, the Forever existing' (this repeated thrice, ever more slowly, in a high sweet register). ‘The perfection of God, the Desired, the Existing, the Single, the Supreme: the perfection of God, the One, the Sole: the perfection of Him who taketh unto himself no male or female partner, nor any like Him, nor any that is disobedient, nor any deputy, equal or offspring. His perfection be extolled.'

The great prayer wound its way into my sleepy consciousness like a serpent, coil after shining coil of words — the voice of the
muezzin
sinking from register to register of gravity — until the whole morning seemed dense with its marvellous healing powers, the intimations of a grace undeserved and unexpected, impregnating that shabby room where Melissa lay, breathing as lightly as a gull, rocked upon the oceanic splendours of a language she would never know.

Of Justine who can pretend that she did not have her stupid side? The cult of pleasure, small vanities, concern for the good opinion of her inferiors, arrogance. She could be tiresomely exigent when she chose. Yes. Yes. But all these weeds are watered by money. I will say only that in many things she thought as a man, while in her actions she enjoyed some of the free vertical independence of the masculine outlook. Our intimacy was of a strange mental order. Quite early on I discovered that she could mind-read in an unerring fashion. Ideas came to us simultaneously. I remember once being made aware that she was sharing in her mind a thought which had just presented itself to mine, namely: ‘This intimacy
should go no further
, for we have already exhausted all its possibilities in our respective imaginations: and what we shall end by discovering, behind the darkly woven colours of sensuality, will be a friendship so profound that we shall become bondsmen forever.' It was, if you like, the flirtation of minds prematurely exhausted by experience which seemed so much more dangerous than a love founded in sexual attraction.

Knowing how much she loved Nessim and loving him so much myself, I could not contemplate this thought without terror. She lay beside me, breathing lightly, and staring at the cherub-haunted ceiling with her great eyes. I said: ‘It can come to nothing, this love-affair between a poor schoolteacher and an Alexandrian society woman. How bitter it would be to have it all end in a conventional scandal which would leave us alone together and give you the task of deciding how to dispose of me.' Justine hated to hear the truth spoken. She turned upon one elbow and lowering those magnificent troubled eyes to mine she stared at me for a long moment. ‘There is no choice in this matter' she said in that hoarse voice I had come to love so much. ‘You talk as if there was a choice. We are not strong or evil enough to exercise choice. All this is part of an experiment arranged by something else, the city perhaps, or another part of ourselves. How do I know?'

I remember her sitting before the multiple mirrors at the dress-maker's, being fitted for a shark-skin costume, and saying: ‘Look! five different pictures of the same subject. Now if I wrote I would try for a multi-dimensional effect in character, a sort of prism-sightedness. Why should not people show more than one profile at a time?'

Now she yawned and lit a cigarette; and sitting up in bed clasped her slim ankles with her hands; reciting slowly, wryly, those marvellous lines of the old Greek poet about a love-affair long since past — they are lost in English. And hearing her speak his lines, touching every syllable of the thoughtful ironic Greek with tenderness, I felt once more the strange equivocal power of the city — its flat alluvial landscape and exhausted airs — and knew her for a true child of Alexandria; which is neither Greek, Syrian nor Egyptian, but a hybrid: a joint.

And with what feeling she reached the passage where the old man throws aside the ancient love-letter which had so moved him and exclaims: ‘I go sadly out on to the balcony; anything to change this train of thought, even if only to see some little movement in the city I love, in its streets and shops!' Herself pushing open the shutters to stand on the dark balcony above a city of coloured lights: feeling the evening wind stir from the confines of Asia: her body for an instant forgotten.

‘Prince' Nessim is of course a joke; at any rate to the shop-keepers and black-coated
commerçants
who saw him drawn soundlessly down the Canopic way in the great silver Rolls with the daffodil hub-caps. To begin with he was a Copt, not a Moslem. Yet somehow the nickname was truly chosen for Nessim was princely in his detachment from the common greed in which the decent instincts of the Alexandrians — even the very rich ones — foundered. Yet the factors which gave him a reputation for eccentricity were neither of them remarkable to those who had lived outside the Levant. He did not care for money, except to spend it — that was the first: the second was that he did not own a
garçonnière
, and appeared to be quite faithful to Justine — an unheard of state of affairs. As for money, being so inordinately rich he was possessed by a positive distaste for it, and would never carry it on his person. He spent in Arabian fashion and gave notes of hand to shopkeepers; night-clubs and restaurants accepted his signed cheques. Nevertheless his debts were punctually honoured, and every morning Selim his secretary was sent out with the car to trace the route of the previous day and to pay any debts accumulated in the course of it.

This attitude was considered eccentric and high-handed in the extreme by the inhabitants of the city whose coarse and derived distinctions, menial preoccupations and faulty education gave them no clue to what style in the European sense was. But Nessim was born to this manner, not merely educated to it; in this little world of studied carnal moneymaking he could find no true province of operation for a spirit essentially gentle and contemplative. The least assertive of men, he caused comment by acts which bore the true stamp of his own personality. People were inclined to attribute his manners to a foreign education, but in fact Germany and England had done little but confuse him and unfit him for the life of the city. The one had implanted a taste for metaphysical speculation in what was a natural Mediterranean mind, while Oxford had tried to make him donnish and had only succeeded in developing his philosophic bent to the point where he was incapable of practising the art he most loved, painting. He thought and suffered a good deal but he lacked the resolution to dare — the first requisite of a practitioner.

Nessim was at odds with the city, but since his enormous fortune brought him daily into touch with the business men of the place they eased their constraint by treating him with a humorous indulgence, a condescension such as one would bestow upon someone who was a little soft in the head. It was perhaps not surprising if you should walk in upon him at the office — that sarcophagus of tubular steel and lighted glass — and find him seated like an orphan at the great desk (covered in bells and pulleys and patent lights) — eating brown bread and butter and reading Vasari as he absently signed letters or vouchers. He looked up at you with that pale almond face, the expression shuttered, withdrawn, almost pleading. And yet somewhere through all this gentleness ran a steel cord, for his staff was perpetually surprised to find out that, inattentive as he appeared to be, there was no detail of the business which he did not know; while hardly a transaction he made did not turn out to be based on a stroke of judgement. He was something of an oracle to his own employees — and yet (they sighed and shrugged their shoulders) he seemed not to care! Not to care about gain, that is what Alexandria recognizes as madness.

I knew them by sight for many months before we actually met — as I knew everyone in the city. By sight and no less by repute: for their emphatic, authoritative and quite conventionless way of living had given them a certain notoriety among our provincial city-dwellers. She was reputed to have had many lovers, and Nessim was regarded as a
mari complaisant
. I had watched them dancing together several times, he slender and with a deep waist like a woman, and long arched beautiful hands; Justine's lovely head — the deep bevel of that Arabian nose and those translucent eyes, enlarged by belladonna. She gazed about her like a half-trained panther.

Then: once I had been persuaded to lecture upon the native poet of the city at the
Atelier des Beaux Arts
— a sort of club where gifted amateurs of the arts could meet, rent studios and so on. I had accepted because it meant a little money for Melissa's new coat, and autumn was on the way. But it was painful to me, feeling the old man all round me, so to speak, impregnating the gloomy streets around the lecture-room with the odour of those verses distilled from the shabby but rewarding loves he had experienced — loves perhaps bought with money, and lasting a few moments, yet living on now in his verse — so deliberately and tenderly had he captured the adventive minute and made all its colours fast. What an impertinence to lecture upon an ironist who so naturally, and with such fineness of instinct took his subject-matter from the streets and brothels of Alexandria! And to be talking, moreover, not to an audience of haberdashers' assistants and small clerks — his immortals — but to a dignified semi-circle of society ladies for whom the culture he represented was a sort of blood-bank: they had come along for a transfusion. Many had actually foregone a bridge-party to do so, though they knew that instead of being uplifted they would be stupefied.