The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [127]
‘Give them to me’ I said firmly and he handed me the parcel meekly. As I went down the stairs he called after me to express relief and gratitude, adding the words: ‘I’ll say a little prayer for you, son.’ I walked back slowly through the dock-area with the parcel under my arm, wondering whether I would ever dare to confide this wonderful story to someone worth sharing it with. The warships turned in their inky reflections — the forest of masts and rigging in the Commercial Port swayed softly among the mirror-images of the water: somewhere a ship’s radio was blaring out the latest jazz-hit to reach Alexandr ia:
Old Tiresias
No-one half so breezy as,
Half so free and easy as
Old Tiresias.
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III
omehow, then, the problem is just how to introject this new and disturbing material into (under?) the skin of the old with-S out changing or irremediably damaging the contours of my subjects or the solution in which I see them move. The golden fish circling so languidly in their great bowl of light — they are hardly aware that their world, the field of their journeys, is a curved one….
The sinking sun which had emptied the harbour roads of all but the black silhouettes of the foreign warships had nevertheless left a flickering greyness — the play of light without colour or resonance upon the surface of a sea still dappled with sails. Dinghies racing for home moved about the floor of the inner harbour, scuttling in and out among the ships like mice among the great boots of primi-tive cottagers. The sprouting tier of guns on the Jean Bart moved slowly — tilted — and then settled back into brooding stillness, aimed at the rosy heart of the city whose highest minarets still gleamed gold in the last rays of the sunset. The flocks of spring pigeons glittered like confetti as they turned their wings to the light. (Fine writing!)
But the great panels of the brass-framed windows in the Yacht Club blazed like diamonds, throwing a brilliant light upon the snowy tables with their food, setting fire to the glasses and jewel-lery and eyes in a last uneasy conflagration before the heavy cur-tains would be drawn and the faces which had gathered to greet Mountolive took on the warm pallors of candle-light.
The triumphs of polity, the resources of tact, the warmth, the patience…. Profligacy and sentimentality … killing love by tak-
ing things easy … sleeping out a chagrin…. This was Alexandria, the unconsciously poetical mother-city exemplified in the names and faces which made up her history. Listen.
Tony Umbada, Baldassaro Trivizani, Claude Amaril, Paul Capo-distria, Dmitri Randidi, Onouphrios Papas, Count Banubula, Jacques de Guéry, Athena Trasha, Djamboulat Bey, Delphine de Francueil, General Cervoni, Ahmed Hassan Pacha, Pozzo di Borgo, Pierre Balbz, Gaston Phipps, Haddad Fahmy Amin, Mehmet Adm, Wilmot Pierrefeu, Toto de Brunel, Colonel Neguib, Dante Borromeo, Benedict Dangeau, Pia dei Tolomei, Gilda Ambron…. The poetry and history of commerce, the rhyme-schemes of the Levant which had swallowed Venice and Genoa. (Names which the passer-by may one day read upon the tombs in the cemetery.)
The conversation rose in a steamy cloud to envelop Mountolive whose personal triumph it was and who stood talking to Nessim, his host, with the gentle-mannered expression on his face which, like a lens, betrayed all the stylized diffidence of his perfect breed-ing. The two men indeed were much alike; only Nessim’s darkness was smooth, cleanly surfaced, and his eyes and hands restless. Despite a difference of age they were well matched — even to the tastes they shared, which the years had done nothing to diminish though they had hardly corresponded directly all the time Mount-olive had been away from Egypt. It had always been to Leila that he wrote, not to her sons. Nevertheless, once he had returned, they were much together and found they had as much to discuss as ever in the past. You would