The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [116]
‘I have debated in myself very long about telling you some of the things I have put down here. At times it seemed a folly and an impertinence. After all, your concern — was it with us as real people or as “characters”? I didn’t know. I still don’t. These pages may lose me your friendship without adding anything to the sum of your knowledge. You have been painting the city, touch by touch, upon a curved surface — was your object poetry or fact? If the latter, then there are things which you have a right to know.’
He still had not explained his amazing appearance before me, so anxious was he about the central meaning of the visitation. He did so now, noticing my bewilderment at the cloud of fire-flies in the normally deserted bay. He smiled.
‘The ship is delayed for a few hours with engine trouble. It is one of Nessim’s. The captain is Hasim Kohly, an old friend: perhaps you remember him? No. Well, I guessed from your des-cription roughly where you must be living; but to be landed on your doorstep like this, I confess!’ His laughter was wonderful to hear once more.
But I hardly listened, for his words had plunged me into a fer-ment, a desire to study his interlinear, to revise — not my book (that has never been of the slightest importance to me for it will never even be published), but my view of the city and its inhabi-tants. For my own personal Alexandria had become, in all this loneliness, as dear as a philosophy of introspection, almost a mono-mania. I was so filled with emotion I did not know what to say to him. ‘Stay with us, Balthazar —’ I said, ‘stay awhile….’
‘We leave in two hours’ he said, and patting the papers before him: ‘This may give you visions and fevers’ he added doubtfully.
‘Good’ I said — ‘I ask for nothing better.’
‘We are all still real people’ he said, ‘whatever you try and do to us — those of us who are still alive. Melissa, Pursewarden — they can’t answer back because they are dead. At least, so one thinks.’
‘So one thinks. The best retorts always come from beyond the grave.’
We sat and began to talk about the past, rather stiffly to be sure. He had already dined on board and there was nothing I could offer him beyond a glass of the good island wine which he sipped slowly. Later he asked to see Melissa’s child, and I led him back through the clustering oleanders to a place from which we could
both look into the great firelit room where she lay looking beautiful and grave, asleep there with her thumb in her mouth. Balthazar’s dark cruel eye softened as he watched her, lightly breathing. ‘One day’ he said in a low voice ‘Nessim will want to see her. Quite soon, mark. He has begun to talk about her, be curious. With old age coming on, he will feel he needs her support, mark my words.’
And he quoted in Greek: ‘First the young, like vines, climb up the dull supports of their elders who feel their fingers on them, soft and tender; then the old climb down the lovely supporting bodies of the young into their proper deaths.’ I said nothing. It was the room itself which was breathing now — not our bodies.
‘You have been lonely here’ said Balthazar.
‘But splend idly, desirably lone ly.’
‘Yes, I envy you. But truthfully.’
And then his eye caught the unfinished portrait of Justine which Clea in another life had given me.
‘That portrait’ he said ‘which was interrupted by a kiss. How good to see that again — how good!’ He smiled. ‘It is like hearing a loved and familiar statement in music which leads one towards an emotion always recapturable, never-failing.’ I did not say any-thing. I did not dare. He turned to me. ‘And Clea?’ he said at last, in the voice of someone interrogating an echo. I said: ‘I have heard nothing from her for ages. Time doesn’t count here. I expect she has married, has gone away to another country, has children, a reputation as a painter … everything one would wish her,’
He looked at me curiously and shook his head. ‘No’ he said;