The Alexandria Quartet

by Lawrence Durrell

  ‘I suppose events are simply a sort of annotation of our feelings — the one might be deduced from the other. Time carries us (boldly imagining that we are discrete egos modelling our own personal futures) — time carries us forward by the momentum of those feelings inside us of which we ourselves are least conscious. Too abstract for you? Then I have expressed the idea badly. I mean, in Justine’s case, having become cured of the mental aberrations brought about by her dreams, her fears, she has been deflated like a bag. For so long the fantasy occupied the foreground of her life that now she is dispossessed of her entire stock-in-trade. It is not only that the death of Capodistria has removed the chief actor in this shadow-play, her chief gaoler. The illness itself had kept her on the move, and when it died it left in its place total exhaustion. She has, so to speak, extinguished with her sexuality her very claims on life, almost her reason. People driven like this to the very boundaries of freewill are forced to turn somewhere for help, to make absolute decisions. If she had not been an Alexandrian (i.e. sceptic) this would have taken the form of religious conversion. How is one to say these things? It is not a question of growing to be happy or unhappy. A whole block of one’s life suddenly falls into the sea, as perhaps yours did with Melissa. But (this is how it works in life, the retributive law which brings good for evil and evil for good) her own release also released Nessim from the inhibitions governing his passional life. I think he always felt that so long as Justine lived he would never be able to endure the slightest human relationship with anyone else. Melissa proved him wrong, or at least so he thought; but with Justine’s departure the old heartsickness cropped up and he was filled with overwhelming disgust for what he had done to her — to Melissa.

  ‘Lovers are never equally matched — do you think? One always overshadows the other and stunts his or her growth so that the overshadowed one must always be tormented by a desire to escape, to be free to grow. Surely this is the only tragic thing about love?

  ‘So that if from another point of view Nessim did plan Capodistria’s death (as has been widely rumoured and believed) he could not have chosen a more calamitous path. It would indeed have been wiser to kill you. Perhaps he hoped in releasing Justine from the succubus (as Arnauti before him) he would free her for himself. (He said so once — you told me.) But quite the opposite has happened. He has granted her a sort of absolution, or poor Capodistria unwittingly did — with the result that she thinks of him now not as a lover but as a sort of arch-priest. She speaks of him with a reverence which would horrify him to hear. She will never go back, how could she? And if she did he would know at once that he had lost her forever — for those who stand in a confessional relationship to ourselves can never love us, never truly love us.

  ‘(Of you Justine said simply, with a slight shrug: “I had to put him out of my mind”.)

  ‘Well, these are some of the thoughts that passed through my mind as the train carried me down through the orange groves to the coast; they were thrown into sharp relief by the book I had chosen to read on the journey, the penultimate volume of God is a Humorist. How greatly Pursewarden has gained in stature since his death! It was before as if he stood between his own books and our understanding of them. I see now that what we found enigmatic about the man was due to a fault in ourselves. An artist does not live a personal life as we do, he hides it, forcing us to go to his books if we wish to touch the true source of his feelings. Underneath all his preoccupations with sex, society, religion, etc. (all the staple abstractions which allow the forebrain to chatter) there is, quite simply, a man tortured beyond endurance by the lack of tenderness in the world.

  ‘And all this brings me back to myself, for I too have been changing in some curious way. The old self-sufficient life has transformed itself into something a little hollow, a little empty. It no longer answers my deepest needs. Somewhere deep inside a tide seems to have turned in my nature. I do not know why but it is towards you, my dear friend, that my thoughts have turned more and more of late. Can one be frank? Is there a friendship possible this side of love which could be sought and found? I speak no more of love — the word and its conventions have become odious to me. But is there a friendship possible to attain which is deeper, even limitlessly deep, and yet wordless, idealess? It seems somehow necessary to find a human being to whom one can be faithful, not in the body (I leave that to the priests) but in the culprit mind? But perhaps this is not the sort of problem which will interest you much these days. Once or twice I have felt the absurd desire to come to you and offer my services in looking after the child perhaps. But it seems clear now that you do not really need anybody any more, and that you value your solitude above all things.…’

  There are a few more lines and then the affectionate superscription.

  The cicadas are throbbing in the great planes, and the summer Mediterranean lies before me in all its magnetic blueness. Somewhere out there, beyond the mauve throbbing line of the horizon lies Africa, lies Alexandria, maintaining its tenuous grasp on one’s affections through memories which are already refunding themselves slowly into forgetfulness; memory of friends, of incidents long past. The slow unreality of time begins to grip them, blurring the outlines — so that sometimes I wonder whether these pages record the actions of real human beings; or whether this is not simply the story of a few inanimate objects which precipitated drama around them — I mean a black patch, a watch-key and a couple of dispossessed wedding-rings.…

  Soon it will be evening and the clear night sky will be dusted thickly with summer stars. I shall be here, as always, smoking by the water. I have decided to leave Clea’s last letter unanswered. I no longer wish to coerce anyone, to make promises, to think of life in terms of compacts, resolutions, covenants. It will be up to Clea to interpret my silence according to her own needs and desires, to come to me if she has need or not, as the case may be. Does not everything* depend on our interpretation of the silence around us? So that.…

  WORKPOINTS

  Landscape-tones: steep skylines, low cloud, pearl ground with shadows in oyster and violet. Accidie. On the lake gunmetal and lemon. Summer: sand lilac sky. Autumn: swollen bruise greys. Winter: freezing white sand, clear skies, magnificent starscapes.

  CHARACTER-SQUEEZES

  Sveva Magnani: pertness, malcontent.

  Gaston Pombal: honey-bear, fleshly opiates.

  Teresa di Petromonti: farded Berenice.

  Ptolomeo Dandolo: astronomer, astrologer, Zen.

  Fuad El Said: black moon-pearl.

  Josh Scobie: piracy.

  Justine Hosnani: arrow in darkness.

  Clea Montis: still waters of pain.

  Gaston Phipps: nose like a sock, black hat.

  Ahmed Zananiri: pole-star criminal.

  Nessim Hosnani: smooth gloves, face frosted glass.

  Melissa Artemis: patron of sorrow.

  S. Balthazar: fables, work, unknowing.

  Pombal asleep in full evening dress. Beside him on the bed a chamberpot full of banknotes he had won at the Casino.

  Da Capo: ‘To bake in sensuality like an apple in its jacket.’

  Spoken impromptu by Gaston Phipps:

  ‘The lover like a cat with fish.

  Longs to be off and will not share his dish.’

  Accident or attempted murder? Justine racing along the desert road to Cairo in the Rolls when suddenly the lights give out. Sightless, the great car swarms off the road and whistling like an arrow buries itself in a sand-dune. It looked as if the wires had been filed down to a thread. Nessim reached her within half an hour. They embrace in tears.

  Balthazar on Justine: ‘You will find that her formidable manner is constructed on a shaky edifice of childish timidities.’

  Clea always has a horoscope cast before any decision reached.

  Clea’s account of the horrible party; driving with Justine they had seen a brown cardboard box by the road. They were late so they put it in the back and did not open it until they reached the garage. Inside w
as dead baby wrapped in newspaper. What to do with this wizened homunculus? Perfectly formed organs. Guests were due to arrive, they had to rush. Justine slipped it into drawer of the hall desk. Party a great success.

  Pursewarden on the ‘n-dimensional novel’ trilogy: ‘The narrative momentum forward is counter-sprung by references backwards in time, giving the impression of a book which is not travelling from a to b but standing above time and turning slowly on its own axis to comprehend the whole pattern. Things do not all lead forward to other things: some lead backwards to things which have passed. A marriage of past and present with the flying multiplicity of the future racing towards one. Anyway, that was my idea.’…

  ‘Then how long will it last, this love?’ (in jest).

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Three weeks, three years, three decades…?’

  ‘You are like all the others … trying to shorten eternity with numbers,’ spoken quietly, but with intense feeling.

  Conundrum: a peacock’s eye. Kisses so amateurish they resembled an early form of printing.

  Of poems: ‘I like the soft thudding of Alexandrines.’ (Nessim).

  ‘Clea and her old father whom she worships. White haired, erect, with a sort of haunted pity in his eyes for the young unmarried goddess he has fathered. Once a year on New Year’s Eve they dance at the Cecil, stately, urbanely. He waltzes like a clockwork man.

  Pombal’s love for Sveva: based on one gay message which took his fancy. When he awoke she’d gone, but she had neatly tied his dress tie to his John Thomas, a perfect bow. This message so captivated him that he at once dressed and went round to propose marriage to her because of her sense of humour.

  Pombal was at his most touching with his little car which he loved devotedly. I remember him washing it by moonlight very patiently.

  Justine: ‘Always astonished by the force of my own emotions — tearing the heart out of a book with my fingers like a fresh loaf.’

  Places: street with arcade: awnings: silverware and doves for sale. Pursewarden fell over a basket and filled the street with apples.

  Message on the corner of a newspaper. Afterwards the closed cab, warm bodies, night, volume of jasmine.

  A basket of quail burst open in the bazaar. They did not try to escape but spread out slowly like spilt honey. Easily recaptured.

  Postcard from Balthazar: ‘Scobie’s death was the greatest fun. How he must have enjoyed it. His pockets were full of love-letters to his aide Hassan, and the whole vice squad turned out to sob at his grave. All these black gorillas crying like babies. A very Alexandrian demonstration of affection. Of course the grave was too small for the coffin. The grave-diggers had knocked off for lunch, so a scratch team of policemen was brought into action. Usual muddle. The coffin fell over on its side and the old man nearly rolled out. Shrieks. The padre was furious. The British Consul nearly died of shame. But all Alexandria was there and a good time was had by all.’

  Pombal walking in stately fashion down Rue Fuad, dead drunk at ten in the morning, clad in full evening dress, cloak and opera hat — but bearing on his shirt-front, written in lipstick, the words ‘Torche-cul des républicains.’

  (Museum)

  Alexander wearing the horns of Ammon (Nessim’s madness). He identified himself with A because of the horns?

  Justine reflecting sadly on the statue of Berenice mourning her little daughter whom the Priests deified: ‘Did that assuage her grief I wonder? Or did it make it more permanent?’

  Tombstone of Apollodorus giving his child a toy. ‘Could bring tears to one’s eyes.’ (Pursewarden) ‘They are all dead. Nothing to show for it.’

  Aurelia beseeching Petesouchos the crocodile god . . Narouz.

  Lioness Holding a Golden flower…

  Ushabti… little serving figures which are supposed to work for the mummy in the underworld.

  Somehow even Scobie’s death did not disturb our picture of him. I had already seen him long before in Paradise — the soft conklin-coloured yams like the haunches of newly cooked babies: the night falling with its deep-breathing blue slur over Tobago, softer than parrot-plumage. Paper flamingoes touched with gold-leaf, rising and falling on the sky, touched by the keening of the bruise-dark water-bamboos. His little hut of reeds with the cane bed, beside which still stands the honoured cake-stand of his earthly life. Clea once asked him: ‘Do you not miss the sea, Scobie?’ and the old man replied simply, without hesitation, ‘Every night I put to sea in my dreams.’

  I copied out and gave her the two translations from Cavafy which had pleased her though they were by no means literal. By now the Cavafy canon has been established by the fine thoughtful translations of Mavrogordato and in a sense the poet has been freed for other poets to experiment with; I have tried to transplant rather than translate — with what success I cannot say.

  THE CITY

  You tell yourself: I’ll be gone

  To some other land, some other sea,

  To a city lovelier far than this

  Could ever have been or hoped to be —

  Where every step now tightens the noose:

  A heart in a body buried and out of use:

  How long, how long must I be here

  Confined among these dreary purlieus

  Of the common mind? Wherever now I look

  Black ruins of my life rise into view.

  So many years have I been here

  Spending and squandering, and nothing gained.

  There’s no new land, my friend, no

  New sea; for the city will follow you,

  In the same streets you’ll wander endlessly,

  The same mental suburbs slip from youth to age,

  In the same house go white at last —

  The city is a cage.

  No other places, always this

  Your earthly landfall, and no ship exists

  To take you from yourself. Ah! don’t you see

  Just as you’ve ruined your life in this

  One plot of ground you’ve ruined its worth

  Everywhere now — over the whole earth?

  THE GOD ABANDONS ANTONY

  When suddenly at darkest midnight heard,

  The invisible company passing, the clear voices,

  Ravishing music of invisible choirs —

  Your fortunes having failed you now,

  Hopes gone aground, a lifetime of desires

  Turned into smoke. Ah! do not agonize

  At what is past deceiving

  But like a man long since prepared

  With courage say your last good-byes

  To Alexandria as she is leaving.

  Do not be tricked and never say

  It was a dream or that your ears misled,

  Leave cowards their entreaties and complaints,

  Let all such useless hopes as these be shed,

  And like a man long since prepared,

  Deliberately, with pride, with resignation

  Befitting you and worthy of such a city

  Turn to the open window and look down

  To drink past all deceiving

  Your last dark rapture from the mystical throng

  And say farewell, farewell to Alexandria leaving.

  NOTES IN THE TEXT

  Page 18. ‘The Poet of the city.’ C. P. Cavafy.

  Page 18. ‘The old man.’ C. P. Cavafy.

  Page 39. Caballi. The astral bodies of men who died a premature death ‘They imagine to perform bodily actions while in fact they have no physical bodies but act in their thoughts.’ Paracelsus.

  Page 39. ‘Held the Gnostic doctrine that creation is a mistake.… He imagines a primal God, the centre of a divine harmony, who sent out manifestations of himself in pairs of male and female. Each pair was inferior to its predecessor and Sophia (“wisdom”) the female of the thirtieth pair, least perfect of all. She showed her imperfection not, like Lucifer, by rebelling from God, but by desiring too ardently to be united to him. She fell through love.’ E. M. Fors
ter, Alexandria.

  Page 40. Quotation from Paracelsus.

  Page 51. Taphia, Egyptian ‘Red Biddy.’

  Page 53. Greek text. .

  Page 77. Amr, Conqueror of Alexandria, was a poet and soldier. Of the Arab invasion E. M. Forster writes: ‘Though they had no intention of destroying her, they destroyed her, as a child might a watch. She never functioned again properly for over 1,000 years.’

  Page 147. A translation of ‘The City’ is among the ‘Workpoints.’

  Page 195. See page 196.

  BALTHAZAR

  To

  MY MOTHER

  these memorials of an unforgotten city

  The mirror sees the man as beautiful, the mirror loves the man; another mirror sees the man as frightful and hates him; and it is always the same being who produces the impressions.

  D. A. F. DE SADE: Justine

  Yes, we insist upon those details, you veil them with a decency which removes all their edge of horror; there remains only what is useful to whoever wishes to become familiar with man; you have no conception how helpful these tableaux are to the development of the human spirit; perhaps we are still so benighted with respect to this branch of learning only because of the stupid restraint of those who wish to write upon such matters. Inhabited by absurd fears, they only discuss the puerilities with which every fool is familiar and dare not, by turning a bold hand to the human heart, offer its gigantic idiosyncrasies to our view.