The Alexandria Quartet

by Lawrence Durrell

  The gharry drew up with a jolt outside the house. ‘Here we are’ I said, and helped my companion down into the road. ‘I’m not as drunk as all that’ he cried cheerfully, shaking off my help, ‘’tis but fatigue, dear friend.’ And while I argued out the cost of the trip with the driver he went round and held a long private confabulation with the horse, stroking its nose. ‘I was giving it some maxims to live by’ he explained as we wound our weary way up the staircase. ‘But the champagne had muddled up my quotation-box. What’s that thing of Shakespeare’s about the lover and the cuckold all compact, seeking the bubble reputation e’en in the cannon’s mouth.’ The last phrase he pronounced in the strange (man-sawing-wood) delivery of Churchill. ‘Or something about swimmers into cleanness leaping — a pre-fab in the eternal mind no less!’

  ‘You are murdering them both.’

  ‘Gosh I’m tired. And there seems to be no bombardment tonight.’

  ‘They are getting less frequent’

  He collapsed on his bed fully dressed, slowly untying his suede desert boots and wriggling with his toes until they slid slowly off and plopped to the floor. ‘Did you ever see Pursewarden’s little book called Select Prayers for English Intellectuals? It was funny. “Dear Jesus, please keep me as eighteenth century as possible — but without the c*******d.…”’ He gave a sleepy chuckle, put his arms behind his head and started drifting into smiling sleep. As I turned out the light he sighed deeply and said: ‘Even the dead are overwhelming us all the time with kindnesses.’

  I had a sudden picture of him as a small boy walking upon the very brink of precipitous cliffs to gather seabirds’ eggs. One slip.…

  But I was never to see him again. Vale!

  VI

  Ten thirsty fingers of my blind Muse

  Confer upon my face their sensual spelling

  The lines ran through my head as I pressed the bell of the summer residence the following evening. In my hand I held the green leather suitcase which contained the private letters of Pursewarden — that brilliant sustained fusillade of words which still exploded in my memory like a firework display, scorching me. I had telephoned to Liza from my office in the morning to make the rendezvous. She opened the door and stood before me with a pale graven expression of expectancy. ‘Good’ she whispered as I murmured my name, and ‘Come.’ She turned and walked before me with a stiff upright expressive gait which reminded me of a child dressed up as Queen Elizabeth for a charade. She looked tired and strained, and yet in a curious way proud. The living-room was empty. Mountolive, I knew, had returned to Cairo that morning. Rather surprisingly, for it was late in the year, a log-fire burned in the chimney-piece. She took up her stand before it, arching her back to the warmth, and rubbing her hands as if she were chilled.

  ‘You have been quick, very quick’ she said, almost sharply, almost with a hint of implied reproach in her tone. ‘But I am glad.’ I had already told her by telephone the gist of my conversation with Keats about the non-existent book. ‘I am glad, because now we can decide something, finally. I couldn’t sleep last night. I kept imagining you reading them, the letters. I kept imagining him writing them.’

  ‘They are marvellous. I have never read anything like them in my whole life.’ I felt a note of chagrin in my own tones.

  ‘Yes’ she said, and fetched a deep sigh. ‘And yet I was afraid you would think so; afraid because you would share David’s opinion of them and advise me that they should be preserved at all costs. Yet he expressly told me to burn them.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Sit down, Darley. Tell me what you really think.’

  I sat down, placing the little suitcase on the floor beside me, and said: ‘Liza, this is not a literary problem unless you choose to regard it as one. You need take nobody’s advice. Naturally nobody who has read them could help but regret the loss.’

  ‘But Darley, if they had been yours, written to someone you … loved?’

  ‘I should feel relief to know that my instructions had been carried out. At least I presume that is what he would feel, wherever he might be now.’

  She turned her lucid blind face to the mirror and appeared to explore her own reflection in it earnestly, resting the tips of her frilly fingers on the mantelpiece. ‘I am as superstitious as he was’ she said at last. ‘But it is more than that. I was always obedient because I knew that he saw further than I and understood more than I did.’

  This caged reflection gives her nothing back

  That women drink like thirsty stags from mirrors

  How very much of Pursewarden’s poetry became crystal-clear and precise in the light of all this new knowledge! How it gathered consequence and poignance from the figure of Liza exploring her own blindness in the great mirror, her dark hair thrown back on her shoulders!

  At last she turned back again, sighing once more, and I saw a look of tender pleading on her face, made the more haunting and expressive by the empty sockets of her eyes. She took a step forward and said: ‘Well, then, it is decided. Only tell me you will help me burn them. They are very many. It will take a little time.’

  ‘If you wish.’

  ‘Let us sit down beside the fire together.’

  So we sat facing each other on the carpet and I placed the suitcase between us, pressing the lock so that the cover released itself and sprang up with a snap.

  ‘Yes’ she said. ‘This is how it must be. I should have known all along that I must obey him.’ Slowly, one by one I took up the pierced envelopes, unfolded each letter in turn and handed it to her to place upon the burning logs.

  ‘We used to sit like this as children with our playbox between us, before the fire, in the winter. So often, and always together. You would have to go back very far into the past to understand it all. And even then I wonder if you would understand. Two small children left alone in an old rambling farmhouse among the frozen lakes, among the mists and rains of Ireland. We had no resources except in each other. He converted my blindness into poetry, I saw with his brain, he with my eyes. So we invented a whole imperishable world of poetry together — better by far than the best of his books, and I have read them all with my fingers, they are all at the institute. Yes I read and re-read them looking for a clue to the guilt which had transformed everything. Nothing had affected us before, everything conspired to isolate us, keep us together. The death of our parents happened when we were almost too small to comprehend it. We lived in this ramshackle old farmhouse in the care of an eccentric and deaf old aunt who did the work, saw that we were fed, and left us to our own devices. There was only one book there, a Plutarch, which we knew by heart. Everything else he invented. This was how I became the strange mythological queen of his life, living in a vast palace of sighs — as he used to say. Sometimes it was Egypt, sometimes Peru, sometimes Byzantium. I suppose I must have known that really it was an old farmhouse kitchen, with shabby deal furniture and floors of red tile. At least when the floors had been washed with carbolic soap with its peculiar smell I knew, with half my mind, that it was a farmhouse floor, and not a palace with magnificent tessellated floors brilliant with snakes and eagles and pygmies. But at a word he brought me back to reality, as he called it. Later, when he started looking for justifications for our love instead of just simply being proud of it, he read me a quotation from a book. “In the African burial rites it is the sister who brings the dead king back to life. In Egypt as well as Peru the king, who was considered as God, took his sister to wife. But the motive was ritual and not sexual, for they symbolized the moon and the sun in their conjunction. The king marries his sister because he, as God the star, wandering on earth, is immortal and may therefore not propagate himself in the children of a strange woman, any more than he is allowed to die a natural death.” That is why he was pleased to come here to Egypt, because he felt, he said, an interior poetic link with Osiris and Isis, with Ptolemy and Arisinoë — the race of the sun and the moon!’

  Quietly and methodically she placed letter after let
ter on the burning pyre, talking in a sad monotone, as much to herself as to me.

  ‘No it would not be possible to make it all comprehensible to those who were not of our race. But when the guilt entered the old poetic life began to lose its magic — not for me: but for him. It was he who made me dye my hair black, so that I could pretend to be a step-sister of his, not a sister. It hurt me deeply to realize suddenly that he was guilty all of a sudden; but as we grew up the world intruded more and more upon us, new lives began to impinge on our solitary world of palaces and kingdoms. He was forced to go away for long periods. When he was absent I had nothing whatsoever except the darkness and what my memory of him could fill it with; somehow the treasures of his invention went all lustreless until he came back, his voice, his touch. All we knew of our parents, the sum of our knowledge, was an old oak cupboard full of their clothes. They seemed enormous to us when we were small — the clothes of giants, the shoes of giants. One day he said they oppressed him, these clothes. We did not need parents. And we took them out into the yard and made a bonfire of them in the snow. We both wept bitterly, I do not know why. We danced round the bonfire singing an old hunting song with savage triumph and yet weeping.’

  She was silent for a long moment, her head hanging in profound concentration over this ancient image, like a soothsayer gazing fixedly into the dark crystal of youth. Then she sighed and raised her head, saying: ‘I know why you hesitate. It is the last letter, isn’t it? You see I counted them. Give it to me, Darley.’

  I handed it to her without a word and she softly placed it in the fire saying: ‘It is over at last.’

  VII

  As the summer burned away into autumn, and autumn into winter once more we became slowly aware that the war which had invested the city had begun slowly to ebb, to flow gradually away along the coast-roads fringing the desert, releasing its hold upon us and our pleasures. For receding like a tide it left its strange coprolitic trophies along the beaches which we had once used, finding them always white and deserted under the flying gulls. War had denied them to us for a long time; but now, when we rediscovered them, we found them littered with pulped tanks and twisted guns, and the indiscriminate wreckage of temporary supply harbours abandoned by the engineers to rot and rust under the desert sun, to sink gradually into the shifting dunes. It gave one a curious melancholy reassurance to bathe there now — as if among the petrified lumber of a Neolithic age: tanks tike the skeletons of dinosaurs, guns standing about tike outmoded furniture. The minefields constituted something of a hazard, and the Bedouin were often straying into them in the course of pasturing; once Clea swerved — for the road was tittered with glistening fragments of shattered camel from some recent accident. But such occasions were rare, and as for the tanks themselves, though burned out they were tenantless. There were no human bodies in them. These had presumably been excavated and decently buried in one of the huge cemeteries which had grown up in various unexpected corners of the western desert tike townships of the dead. The city, too, was finding its way back to its normal habits and rhythms, for the bombardments had now ceased altogether and the normal night-life of the Levant had begun once more to flower. And though uniforms were less abundant the bars and night clubs still plied a splendid trade with servicemen on leave.

  My own eventless life, too, seemed to have settled itself into a natural routine-fed pattern, artificially divided by a private life which I had surrendered to my complete absorption in Clea, and an office life which, though not onerous, had little meaning to me. Little had changed: but yes, Maskelyne had at last managed to break his bonds and escape back to his regiment. He called on us, resplendent in uniform, to say good-bye, shyly pointing — not his pipe but a crisp new swagger-stick — at his tail-wagging colleague. ‘I told you he’d do it’ said Telford with a triumphant sadness in his voice. ‘I always knew it.’ But Mountolive stayed on, apparently still ‘frozen’ in his post.

  From time to time by arrangement I revisited the child at Karm Abu Girg to see how she was faring. To my delight I found that the transplantation, about which I had had many misgivings, was working perfectly. The reality of her present life apparently chimed with the dreams I had invented for her. It was all as it should be — the coloured playing-card characters among whom she could now number herself! If Justine remained a somewhat withdrawn and unpredictable figure of moods and silences it only added, as far as I could see, to the sombre image of a dispossessed empress. In Nessim she had realized a father. His image had gained definition by greater familiarity because of his human tendernesses. He was a delightful companion-father now, and together they explored the desert lands around the house on horseback. He had given her a bow and arrows, and a little girl of about her own age, Taor, as a body-servant and amah. The so-called palace, too, which we had imagined together, stood the test of reality magnificently. Its labyrinth of musty rooms and its ramshackle treasures were a perpetual delight. Thus with her own horses and servants, and a private palace to play in, she was an Arabian Nights queen indeed. She had almost forgotten the island now, so absorbed was she among these new treasures. I did not see Justine during these visits, nor did I try to do so. Sometimes however Nessim was there, but he never accompanied us on our walks or rides, and usually the child came to the ford to meet me with a spare horse.

  In the spring Balthazar, who had by now quite come to himself and had thrown himself once more into his work, invited Clea and myself to take part in a ceremony which rather pleased his somewhat ironic disposition. This was the ceremonial placing of flowers on Capodistria’s grave on the anniversary of the Great Porn’s birthday. ‘I have the express authority of Capodistria himself’ he explained. ‘Indeed he himself always pays for the flowers every year.’ It was a fine sunny day for tie excursion and Balthazar insisted that we should walk. Though somewhat hampered by the nosegay he carried he was in good voice. His vanity in the matter of his hair had become too strong to withstand, and he had duly submitted to Mnemjian’s ministrations, thus ‘rubbing out his age’, as he expressed it. Indeed the change was remarkable. He was now, once more, the old Balthazar, with his sapient dark eyes turned ironically on the doings of the city. And no less on Capodistria from whom he had just received a long letter. ‘You can have no idea what the old brute is up to over the water. He has taken the Luciferian path and plunged into Black Magic. But I’ll read it to you. His graveside is, now I come to think of it, a most appropriate place to read his account of his experiments!’

  The cemetery was completely deserted in the sunshine. Capodistria had certainly spared no expense to make his grave imposing and had achieved a fearsome vulgarity of decoration which was almost mind-wounding. Such cherubs and scrolls, such floral wreaths. On the slab was engraved the ironic text: ‘Not Lost But Gone Before’. Balthazar chuckled affectionately as he placed his flowers upon the grave and said ‘Happy Birthday’ to it. Then he turned aside, removing coat and hat for the sun was high and bright, and together we sat on a bench under a cypress tree while Clea ate toffees and he groped in his pockets for the bulky typewritten packet which contained Capodistria’s latest and longest letter. ‘Clea’ he said, ‘you must read it to us. I’ve forgotten my reading glasses. Besides, I would like to hear it through once, to see if it sounds less fantastic or more. Will you?’

  Obediently she took the close-typed pages and started reading.

  ‘My dear M.B.’

  ‘The initials’ interposed Balthazar ‘stand for the nickname which Pursewarden fastened on me — Melancholia Borealis, no less. A tribute to my alleged Judaic gloom. Proceed, my dear Clea.’

  The letter was in French.

  ‘I have been conscious, my dear friend, that I owed you some account of my new life here, yet though I have written you fairly frequently I have got into the habit of evading the subject. Why? Well, my heart always sank at the thought of your derisive laugh. It is absurd, for I was never a sensitive man or quick to worry about the opinion of my neighbours. Another thing. I
t would have involved a long and tiresome explanation of the unease and unfarniliarity I always felt at the meetings of the Cabal which sought to drench the world in its abstract goodness. I did not know then that my path was not the path of Light but of Darkness. I would have confused it morally or ethically with good and evil at that time. Now I recognize the path I am treading as simply the counterpoise — the bottom end of the see-saw, as it were — which keeps the light side up in the air. Magic! I remember you once quoting to me a passage (quite nonsensical to me then) from Paracelsus. I think you added at the time that even such gibberish must mean something. It does! “True Alchemy which teaches how to make or transmute out of the five imperfect metals, requires no other materials but only the metals. The perfect metals are made out of the imperfect metals, through them and with them alone; for with other things is Luna (phantasy) but in the metals is Sol (wisdom).”

  ‘I leave a moment’s pause for your peculiar laugh, which in the past I would not have been slow to echo! What a mountain of rubbish surrounding the idea of the tinctura physicorum, you would observe. Yes but.…

  ‘My first winter in this windy tower was not pleasant. The roof leaked. I did not have my books to solace me as yet. My quarters seemed rather cramped and I wondered about extending them. The property on which the tower stands above the sea had also a straggle of cottages and outbuildings upon it; here lodged the ancient, deaf couple of Italians who looked after my wants, washed and cleaned and fed me. I did not want to turn them out of their quarters but wondered whether I could not convert the extra couple of barns attached to their abode. It was then that I found, to my surprise, that they had another lodger whom I had never seen, a strange and solitary creature who only went abroad at night, and wore a monk’s cassock. I owe all my new orientation to my meeting with him. He is a defrocked Italian monk, who describes himself as a Rosicrucian and an alchemist. He lived here among a mountain of masonic manuscripts — some of very great age — which he was in the process of studying. It was he who first convinced me that this line of enquiry was (despite some disagreeable aspects) concerned with increasing man’s interior hold on himself, on the domains which lie unexplored within him; the comparison with everyday science is not fallacious, for the form of this enquiry is based as firmly on method — only with different premises! And if, as I say, it has some disagreeable aspects, why so has formal science — vivisection for instance. Anyway, here I struck up a rapport, and opened up for myself a field of study which grew more and more engrossing as the months went by. I also discovered at last something which eminently fitted my nature! Truthfully, everything in this field seemed to nourish and sustain me! Also I was able to be of considerable practical assistance to the Abbé F. as I will call him, for some of these manuscripts (stolen from the secret lodges on Athos I should opine) were in Greek, Arabic and Russian — languages which he did not know well. Our friendship ripened into a partnership. But it was many months before he introduced me to yet another strange, indeed formidable figure who was also dabbling in these matters. This was an Austrian Baron who lived in a large mansion inland and who was busy (no, do not laugh) on the obscure problem which we once discussed — is it in De Natura Rerum? I think it is — the generatio homunculi? He had a Turkish butler and famulus to help him in his experiments. Soon I became persona grata here also and was allowed to help them to the best of my ability.