The Alexandria Quartet

by Lawrence Durrell

  ‘They have heard us.’

  Somewhere in the darkness there was a thin snarl of voice, and the silence became suddenly padded out with the scamper of feet upon rotted woodwork. In the expiring flicker of the match I saw, as if somewhere very far away, a bar of light — like a distant furnace door opening in heaven. And voices now, the voices of ants! The children came through a sort of hatch or trap-door made of darkness, in their cotton nightgowns, absurdly faded. With rings on their fingers and bells on their toes. She shall have music wherever she goes! One of them carried a waxlight floating in a saucer. They twanged nasally about us, interrogating our needs with blasting frankness — but they were surprised to see Justine sitting beside the Viking catafalque, her head (now smiling) half turned towards them.

  ‘I think we should leave’ I said in a low voice, for they smelt dreadfully these tiny apparitions, and they showed a disagreeable tendency to twine their skinny arms about my waist as they wheedled and intoned. But Justine turned to one and said: ‘Bring the light here, where we can all see.’ And when the light was brought she suddenly turned herself, crossed her legs under her, and in the high ringing tone of the street storyteller she intoned: ‘Now gather about me, all ye blessed of Allah, and hear the wonders of the story I shall tell you.’ The effect was electric; they settled about her like a pattern of dead leaves in a wind, crowding up close together. Some even climbed on to the old divan, chuckling and nudging with delight. And in the same rich triumphant voice, saturated with unshed tears, Justine began again in the voice of the professional story-teller: ‘Ah, listen to me, all ye true believers, and I will unfold to you the story of Yuna and Aziz, of their great many-petalled love, and of the mishaps which befell them from the doing of Abu Ali Saraq el-Maza. In those days of the great Califate, when many heads fell and armies marched.…’

  It was a wild sort of poetry for the place and the time — the little circle of wizened faces, the divan, the flopping light; and the strangely captivating lilt of the Arabic with its heavy damascened imagery, the thick brocade of alliterative repetitions, the nasal twanging accents, gave it a laic splendour which brought tears to my eyes — gluttonous tears! It was such a rich diet for the soul! It made me aware how thin the fare is which we moderns supply to our hungry readers. The epic contours, that is what her story had! I was envious. How rich these beggar children were. And I was envious too of her audience. Talk of suspended judgement ! They sank into the imagery of her story like plummets. One saw, creeping out like mice, their true souls — creeping out upon those painted masks in little expressions of wonder, suspense and joy. In that yellow gloaming they were expressions of a terrible truth. You saw how they would be in middle age — the witch, the good wife, the gossip, the shrew. The poetry had stripped them to the bone and left only their natural selves to flower thus in expressions faithfully portraying their tiny stunted spirits!

  How could I help but admire her for giving me one of the most significant and memorable moments of a writer’s life? I put my arm about her shoulders and sat, as rapt as any of them, following the long sinuous curves of the immortal story as it unfolded before our eyes.

  They could hardly bear to part with us when at last the story came to an end. They clung to her, pleading for more. Some picked the hem of her skirt and kissed it in an agony of pleading. ‘There is no time’ she said, smiling calmly. ‘But I will come again, my little ones.’ They hardly heeded the money she distributed but thronged after us along the dark corridors to the blackness of the square. At the corner I looked back but could only see the flicker of shadows. They said farewell in voices of heartbreaking sweetness. We talked in deep contented silence across the shattered, time-corrupted town until we reached the cool seafront; and stood a long time leaning upon the cold stone piers above the sea, smoking and saying nothing! At last she turned to me a face of tremendous weariness and whispered: ‘Take me home, now. I’m dead tired.’ And so we hailed a pottering gharry and swung along the Corniche as sedately as bankers after a congress. ‘I suppose we are all hunting for the secrets of growth!’ was all she said as we parted.

  It was a strange remark to make at parting. I watched her walk wearily up the steps to the great house groping for her key. I still felt drunk with the story of Yuna and Aziz!

  Brother Ass, it is a pity that you will never have a chance to read all this tedious rigmarole; it would amuse me to study your puzzled expression as you did so. Why should the artist always be trying to saturate the world with his own anguish, you asked me once. Why indeed? I will give you another phrase: emotional gongorism! I have always been good at polite phrase-making.

  Loneliness and desire,

  Lord of the Flies,

  Are thy unholy empire and

  The self’s inmost surprise!

  Come to these arms, my dear old Dutch

  And firmly bar the door

  I could not love thee, dear, so much

  Loved I not ******** more!

  And later, aimlessly walking, who should I encounter but the slightly titubating Pombal just back from the Casino with a chamber-pot full of paper money and a raging thirst for a last beaker of champagne which we took together at the Étoile. It was strange that I had no taste for a girl that night; somehow Yuna and Aziz had barred the way. Instead I straggled back to Mount Vulture with a bottle in my mackintosh pocket, to confront once more the ill-starred pages of my book which, twenty years from now, will be the cause of many a thrashing among the lower forms of our schools. It seemed a disastrous sort of gift to be offering to the generations as yet unborn; I would rather have left them something like Yuna and Aziz, but it hasn’t been possible since Chaucer; the sophistication of the laic audience is perhaps to blame? The thought of all those smarting little bottoms made me close my notebooks with a series of ill-tempered snaps. Champagne is a wonderfully soothing drink, however, and prevented me from being too cast-down. Then I stumbled upon the little note which you, Brother Ass, had pushed under the door earlier in the evening: a note which complimented me on the new series of poems which the Anvil was producing (a misprint per line); and writers being what they are I thought most kindly of you, I raised my glass to you. In my eyes you had become a critic of the purest discernment; and once more I asked myself in exasperated tones why the devil I had never wasted more time on you? It was really remiss of me. And falling asleep I made a mental note to take you to dinner the next evening and talk your jackass’s head off — about writing, of course, what else? Ah! but that is the point. Once a writer seldom a talker; I knew that, speechless as Goldsmith, I should sit hugging my hands in my armpits while you did the talking!

  In my sleep I dug up a mummy with poppy-coloured lips, dressed in the long white wedding dress of the Arab sugar-dolls. She smiled but would not awake, though I kissed her and talked to her persuasively. Once her eyes half opened; but they closed again and she lapsed back into smiling sleep. I whispered her name which was Yuna, but which had unaccountably become Liza. And as it was no use I interred her once more among the shifting dunes where (the wind-shapes were changing fast) there would be no trace remaining of the spot. At dawn I woke early and took a gharry down to the Rushdi beach to cleanse myself in the dawn-sea. There was not a soul about at that time save Clea, who was on the far beach in a blue bathing-costume, her marvellous hair swinging about her like a blonde Botticelli. I waved and she waved back, but showed no inclination to come and talk which made me grateful. We lay, a thousand yards apart, smoking and wet as seals. I thought for an instant of the lovely burnt coffee of her summer flesh, with the little hairs on her temples bleached to ash. I inhaled her metaphorically, like a whiff of roasting coffee, dreaming of the white thighs with those small blue veins in them! Well, well… she would have been worth taking trouble over had she not been so beautiful. That brilliant glance exposed everything and forced me to take shelter from her.

  One could hardly ask her to bandage them in order to be made love to! And yet… like the black silk stockin
gs some men insist on! Two sentences ending with a preposition! What is poor Pursewarden coming to?

  His prose created grievous lusts

  Among the middle classes

  His propositions were decried

  As dangerous for the masses

  His major works were classified

  Among the noxious gases

  England awake!

  Brother Ass, the so-called act of living is really an act of the imagination. The world — which we always visualize as ‘the outside’ World — yields only to self-exploration! Faced by this cruel, yet necessary paradox, the poet finds himself growing gills and a tail, the better to swim against the currents of unenlightenment. What appears to be perhaps an arbitrary act of violence is precisely the opposite, for by reversing process in this way, he unites the rushing, heedless stream of humanity to the still, tranquil, motionless, odourless, tasteless plenum from which its own motive essence is derived. (Yes, but it hurts to realize!) If he were to abandon his role all hope of gaining a purchase on the slippery surface of reality would be lost, and everything in nature would disappear! But this act, the poetic act, will cease to be necessary when everyone can perform it for himself. What hinders them, you ask? Well, we are all naturally afraid to surrender our own pitifully rationalized morality — and the poetic jump I’m predicating lies the other side of it. It is only terrifying because we refuse to recognize in ourselves the horrible gargoyles which decorate the totem poles of our churches — murderers, liars, adulterers and so on. (Once recognized, these papier-mache masks fade.) Whoever makes this enigmatic leap into the heraldic reality of the poetic life discovers that truth has its own built-in morality! There is no need to wear a truss any longer. Inside the penumbra of this sort of truth morality can be disregarded because it is a donnée, a part of the thing, and not simply a brake, an inhibition. It is there to be lived out and not thought out! Ah, Brother Ass, this will seem a far cry to the ‘purely literary’ preoccupations which beset you; yet unless you tackle this corner of the field with your sickle you will never reap the harvest in yourself, and so fulfil your true function here below.

  But how? you ask me plaintively. And truly here you have me by the short hairs, for the thing operates differently with each one of us. I am only suggesting that you have not become desperate enough, determined enough. Somewhere at the heart of things you are still lazy of spirit. But then, why struggle? If it is to happen to you it will happen of its own accord. You may be quite right to hang about like this, waiting. I was too proud. I felt I must take it by the horns, this vital question of my birthright. For me it was grounded in an act of will. So for people like me I would say: ‘Force the lock, batter down the door. Outface, defy, disprove the Oracle in order to become the poet, the darer!’

  But I am aware the test may come under any guise, perhaps even in the physical world by a blow between the eyes or a few lines scribbled in pencil on the back of an envelope left in a café. The heraldic reality can strike from any point, above or below: it is not particular. But without it the enigma will remain. You may travel round the world and colonize the ends of the earth with your lines and yet never hear the singing yourself.

  IV

  I found myself reading these passages from Pursewarden’s notebooks with all the attention and amusement they deserved and without any thought of ‘exoneration’ — to use the phrase of Clea. On the contrary, it seemed to me that his observation was not lacking in accuracy and whatever whips and scorpions he had applied to my image were well justified. It is, moreover, useful as well as salutary to see oneself portrayed with such blistering candour by someone one admires! Yet I was a trifle surprised not to feel even a little wounded in my self-esteem. Not only were no bones broken, but at times, chuckling aloud at his sallies, I found myself addressing him under my breath as if he were actually present before me, uttering rather than writing down these unpalatable home-truths. ‘You bastard’ I said under my breath. ‘You just wait a little bit.’ Almost as if one day I might right the reckoning with him, pay off the score! It was troubling to raise my head and realize suddenly that he had already stepped behind the curtains, vanished from the scene; he was so much of a presence, popping up everywhere, with the strange mixture of strengths and weaknesses which made up his enigmatic character.

  ‘What are you chuckling at?’ said Telford, always anxious to share a jocose exchange of office wit provided it had the requisite moribund point.

  ‘A notebook.’

  Telford was a large man draped in ill-cut clothes and a spotted blue bow tie. His complexion was blotchy and of the kind which tears easily under a razor-blade; consequently there was always a small tuft of cotton wool sticking to chin or ear, stanching a wound. Always voluble and bursting with the wrong sort of expansive bonhomie he gave the impression of being at war with his dentures, which were ill-fitting. He gobbled and gasped, biting on loose stoppings, or swallowing a soft palate, gasping like a fish as he uttered his pleasantries or laughed at his own jokes like a man riding a bone-shaker, his top set of teeth bumping up and down on his gums. ‘I say, old fruit, that was rich’ he would exclaim. I did not find him too disagreeable an inmate of the office which we shared at the censorship, for the work was not exacting and he, as an old hand, was always ready to give me advice or help with it; I enjoyed too his obstinately recurring stories of the mythical ‘old days’, when he, Little Tommy Telford, had been a personage of great importance, second only in rank and power to the great Maskelyne, our present Chief. He always referred to him as ‘The Brig’, and made it very clear that the department, which had once been Arab Bureau, had seen better times, had in fact been downgraded to a mere censorship department dealing with the ebb and flow of civilian correspondence over the Middle East. A menial rôle compared to ‘Espionage’ which he pronounced in four separate syllables.

  Stories of this ancient glory, which had now faded beyond recall, formed part of the Homeric Cycle, so to speak, of office life: to be recited wistfully during intervals between snatches of work or on afternoons when some small mishap like a broken fan had made concentration in those airless buildings all but impossible. It was from Telford that I learned of the long internecine struggle between Pursewarden and Maskelyne — a struggle which was, in a sense, continuing on another plane between the silent Brigadier and Mountolive, for Maskelyne was desperately anxious to rejoin his regiment and shed his civilian suit. This desire had been baulked. Mountolive, explained Telford with many a gusty sigh (waving chapped and podgy hands which were stuffed with bluish clusters of veins like plums in a cake) — Mountolive had ‘got at’ the War Office and persuaded them not to countenance Maskelyne’s resignation. I must say the Brigadier, whom I saw perhaps twice a week, did convey an impression of sullen, saturnine fury at being penned up in a civilian department while so much was going on in the desert, but of course any regular soldier would. ‘You see’ said Telford ingenuously, ‘when a war comes along there’s bags of promotion, old thing, bags of it. The Brig has a right to think of his career like any other man. It is different for us. We were born civilians, so to speak.’ He himself had spent many years in the currant trade in the Eastern Levant residing in places like Zante and Patras. His reasons for coming to Egypt were obscure. Perhaps he found life more congenial in a large British colony. Mrs Telford was a fattish little duck who used mauve lipstick and wore hats like pincushions. She only appeared to live for an invitation to the Embassy on the King’s birthday. (‘Mavis loves her little official “do”, she does.’)

  But if the administrative war with Mountolive was so far empty of victory there were consolations, said Telford, from which the Brig could derive a studied enjoyment: for Mountolive was very much in the same boat. This made him (Telford) ‘chortle’ — a characteristic phrase which he often used. Mountolive, it seemed, was no less eager to abandon his post, and had indeed applied several times for a transfer from Egypt. Unluckily, however, the war had intervened with its policy of ‘freezing person
nel’ and Kenilworth, no friend of the Ambassador, had been sent out to execute this policy. If the Brigadier was pinned down by the intrigues of Mountolive, the latter had been pinned down just as certainly by the newly appointed Personnel Adviser — pinned down ‘for the duration’! Telford rubbed unctuous hands as he retailed all this to me! ‘It’s a case of the biter bit all right’ he said. ‘And if you ask me the Brig will manage to get away sooner than Sir David. Mark my words, old fruit.’ A single solemn nod was enough to satisfy him that his point had been taken.