The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [109]
simply a work-mystic after the manner of Panayotis at Abousir. Watching her now and remembering the touching and tor-menting person she had once been for us all I found it hard to comprehend the change into this tubby little peasant with the hard paws.
‘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 aber-rations 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 Alex-andrian (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 over-whelming 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 Capodis-tria’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 enig-matic 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. Under-neath all his preoccupations