The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [130]
for the calm and peace of widowhood! Am I imagining this? I do not think so.
How had all this come about? To understand it is necessary to work backwards, through the great Interlinear which Balthazar has constructed around my manuscript, towards that point in time where the portrait which Clea was painting was interrupted by a kiss. It is strange to look at it now, the portrait, standing un-finished on the old-fashioned mantelpiece of the island house. ‘An idea had just come into her mind, but had not yet reached the lips.’
And then, softly, her lips fell where the painter’s wet brush should have fallen. Kisses and brush-strokes — I should be writing of poor Melissa!
How distasteful all this subject-matter is — what Pursewarden has called ‘the insipid kiss of familiars’; and how innocent! The black gloves she wore in the portrait left a small open space when they were buttoned up — the shape of a heart. And that innocent, ridiculous kiss only spoke admiration and pity for the things Justine was telling her about the loss of her child — the daughter which had been stolen from her while it was playing on the river-bank. ‘Her wrists, her small wrists. If you could have seen how beautiful and tame she was, a squirrel.’ In the hoarseness of the tone, in the sad eyes and the down-pointed mouth with a comma in each cheek. And holding out a hand with finger and thumb joined to describe the circuit of those small wrists. Clea took and kissed the heart in the black glove. She was really kissing the child, the mother. Out of this terrible sympathy her innocence projected the consuming shape of a sterile love. But I am going too fast. More-over, how am I to make comprehensible scenes which I myself see only with such difficulty — these two women, the blonde and the bronze in a darkening studio at Saint Saba, among the rags and the paintpots and the warm gallery of portraits which lined the walls, Balthazar, Da Capo, even Nessim himself, Clea’s dearest friend? It is hard to compose them in a stable colour so that the outlines are not blurred.
Justine at this time … coming from nowhere, she had per-formed one trick regarded as clever by the provincials of Alexan-dria. She had married Arnauti, a foreigner, only to earn the con-tempt of society by letting him in the end divorce and abandon her. Of the fate of the child, few people knew or cared. She was not ‘in
society’ as the saying goes…. For a time poverty forced her to do a little modelling at so many piastres an hour for the art-students of the Atelier. Clea, who knew her only by hearsay, passed through the long gallery one day when she was posing and, struck by the dark Alexandrian beauty of her face, engaged her for a portrait. That was how those long conversations grew up in the silences of the painter; for Clea liked her subjects to talk freely, provided they stayed still. It gave a submarine life to their features, and filled their looks with unconscious interpretations of thought — the true beauty in otherwise dead flesh.
Clea’s generous innocence — it needed something like that to see the emptiness in which Justine lived with her particular sor-rows — factual illustrations merely of a mind at odds with itself: for we create our own misfortunes and they bear our own finger-prints. The gesture itself was simply a clumsy attempt to appro-priate the mystery of true experience, true suffering — as by touching a holy man the supplicant hopes for a transference of the grace he lacks. The kiss did not for a moment expect itself to be answered by another — to copy itself like the reflections of a moth in a look ing-glass. That would have been too expensive a gesture had it been premeditated. So it proved! Clea’s own body simply struggled to disengage itself from the wrappings of its innocence as a baby or a statue struggles for life under the fingers or forceps of its author. Her bankruptcy was one of extreme youth, Justine’s ageless; her innocence was as defenceless as memory itself. Seeking and admiring only the composure of Justine’s sorrow she found herself left with