The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [118]
II
e cénacle Capodistria used to call us in those days when we gathered for an early morning shave in the Ptolemaic parlour L of Mnemjian, with its mirrors and palms, its bead curtains and the delicious mimicry of clear warm water and white linen: a laying out and anointing of corpses. The violet-eyed hunchback himself officiated, for we were valued customers all (dead Pharaohs at the natron baths, guts and brains to be removed, renovated and replaced). He himself, the barber, was often unshaven having just
hurried down from the hospital after shaving a corpse. Briefly we met here in the padded chairs, in the mirrors, before separating to go about our various tasks — Da Capo to see his brokers, Pombal to totter to the French consulate (mouth full of charred moths, hangover, sensation of having walked about all night on his eyeballs), I to teach, Scobie to the Police Bureau, and so on….
I have somewhere a faded flashlight photograph of this morning ritual, taken by poor John Keats, the Global Agency correspon-dent. It is strange to look at it now. The smell of the gravecloth is on it. It is a speaking likeness of an Alexandrian spring morning: quiet rubbing of coffee pestles, curdling crying of fat pigeons. I recognize my friends by the very sounds they make: Capodistria’s characteristic ‘ Quatsch’ and ‘ Pouagh’ at some political remark, followed by that dry cachinnation — the retching of a metal stomach; Scobie’s tobacco cough ‘ Teuch, Teuch’: Pombal’s soft
‘ Tiens’, like someone striking a triangle. ‘ Tiens’ . And in one corner there I am, in my shabby raincoat — the per-fected image of a schoolteacher. In the other corner sits poor little Toto de Brunel. Keats’s photograph traps him as he is raising a ringed finger to his temple — the fatal temple.
Toto! He is an original, a numéro. His withered witch’s features and small boy’s brown eyes, widow’s peak, queer art nouveau smile. He was the darling of old society women too proud to pay for gigolos. ‘ Toto, mon chou, c’ est toi! ’ (Madame Umbada), ‘ Comme il est charmant, ce Toto! ’ (Athena Trasha). He lives on these dry crusts of approbation, an old woman’s man, with the dimples sinking daily deeper into the wrinkled skin of an ageless face, quite happy, I suppose. Yes.
‘ Toto — comment vas-tu? ’ — ‘ Si heureux de vous voir, Madame Martinengo! ’
He was what Pombal scornfully called ‘a Gentleman of the Second Declension.’ His smile dug one’s grave, his kindness was anaesthetic. Though his fortune was small, his excesses trivial, yet he was right in the social swim. There was, I suppose, nothing to be done with him for he was a woman: yet had he been born one he would long since have cried himself into a decline. Lacking charm, his pederasty gave him a kind of illicit importance. ‘ Homme
serviable, homme gracieux’ (Count Banubula, General Cervoni —
what more does one want?).
Though without humour, he found one day that he could split sides. He spoke indifferent English and French, but whenever at loss for a word he would put in one whose meaning he did not know and the grotesque substitution was often delightful. This became his standard mannerism. In it, he almost reached poetry —
as when he said ‘Some flies have come off my typewriter’ or ‘The car is trepanned today’ or ‘I ran so fast I got dandruff.’ He could do this in three languages. It excused him from learning them. He spoke a Toto-tongue of his own.
Invisible behind the lens itself that morning stood Keats — the world’s sort of Good Fellow, empty of ill intentions. He smelt lightly of perspiration. C’ est le métier qui exige. Once he had wanted to be a writer but took the wrong turning, and now his profession had so trained him to stay on the superficies of real life (acts and facts about acts) that he had developed the typical journalist’s neurosis (they drink to still it): namely that Something has hap-pened, or is about to happen, in the next street, and that they will not know about it until it is too late to ‘send’. This haunting fear