The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [117]
It was long after midnight when the seamen called him from the dark olive groves. I walked to the beach with him, sad to see him leave so soon. A rowboat waited at the water’s edge with a sailor standing to his oars in it. He said something in Arabic. The spring sea was enticingly warm after a day’s sunshine and as Balthazar entered the boat the whim seized me to swim out with him to the vessel which lay not two hundred yards away from the shore. This I did and hovered to watch him climb the rail, and to watch the boat drawn up. ‘Don’t get caught in the screw’ he called, and ‘Go back before the engines start’ — ‘I will’ — ‘But wait —
before you go —’ He ducked back into a stateroom to reappear and
drop something into the water beside me. It fell with a soft splash.
‘A rose from Alexandria’ he said, ‘from the city which has every-thing but happiness to offer its lovers.’ He chuckled. ‘Give it to the child.’
‘Balthazar, good-bye!’
‘Write to me — if you dare!’
Caught like a spider between the cross mesh of lights, and turn-ing towards those yellow pools which still lay between the dark shore and myself, I waved and he waved back.
I put the precious rose between my teeth and dog-paddled back to my clothes on the pebble beach, talking to myself. And there, lying upon the table in the yellow lamplight, lay the great interlinear to Justine — as I had called it. It was cross-hatched, crabbed, starred with questions and answers in different-coloured inks, in typescript. It seemed to me then to be somehow symbolic of the very reality we had shared — a palimpsest upon which each of us had left his or her individual traces, layer by layer.
Must I now learn to see it all with new eyes, to accustom myself to the truths which Balthazar has added? It is impossible to des-cribe with what emotion I read his words — sometimes so detailed and sometimes so briefly curt — as for example in the list he had headed ‘Some Fallacies and Misapprehensions’ where he said coldly: ‘Number 4. That Justine “loved” you. She “loved”, if any-one, Pursewarden. “What does that mean”? She was forced to use you as a decoy in order to protect him from the jealousy of Nessim whom she had married. Pursewarden himself did not care for her at all — supreme logic of love!’
In my mind’s eye the city rose once more against the flat mirror of the green lake and the broken loins of sandstone which marked the desert’s edge. The politics of love, the intrigues of desire, good and evil, virtue and caprice, love and murder, moved obscurely in the dark corners of Alexandria’s streets and squares, brothels and drawing-rooms — moved like a great congress of eels in the slime of plot and counter-plot.
It was almost dawn before I surrendered the fascinating mound of paper with its comments upon my own real (inner) life and like a drunkard stumbled to my bed, my head aching, echoing with the city, the only city left where every extreme of race and habit can
meet and marry, where inner destinies intersect. I could hear the dry voice of my friend repeating as I fell asleep: ‘How much do you care to know … how much more do you care to know?’ — ‘I must know everything in order to be at last delivered from the city’ I replied in my dream.
* * * * *
‘When you pluck a flower, the branch springs back into place. This is not true of the heart’s affections’ is what Clea once said to Balthazar.
* * * * *
And so, slowly, reluctantly, I have been driven back to my starting-point, like a man who at the end of a tremendous journey is told that he has been sleepwalking. ‘Truth’ said Balthazar to me once, blowing his nose in an old tennis sock, ‘Truth is what most contradicts itself in time.’
And Pursewarden on another occasion, but not less memorably:
‘If things were always what they seemed, how impoverished would be the imagination of man!’
How will I ever deliver myself from this whore among cities —
sea, desert, minaret, sand, sea?
No. I must set it all down in cold black and white, until such time as the memory and impulse of it is spent. I know