The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [189]
“It seems to me unlike your normal behaviour, and I must say I feel a good deal of contempt for you after the way Nessim has treated you.” She hung her head and said “I only hoped to dis-cover something about the child — something which I think he is hiding from me.”’
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PART III
X
suppose (writes Balthazar) that if you wished somehow to incorporate all I am telling you into your own Justine manu-I script now, you would find yourself with a curious sort of book
— the story would be told, so to speak, in layers. Unwittingly I may have supplied you with a form, something out of the way! Not unlike Pursewarden’s idea of a series of novels with “sliding panels”
as he called them. Or else, perhaps, like some medieval palimpsest where different sorts of truth are thrown down one upon the other, the one obliterating or perhaps supplementing another. Industrious monks scraping away an elegy to make room for a verse of Holy Writ!
‘I don’t suppose such an analogy would be a bad one to apply to the reality of Alexandria, a city at once sacred and profane; between Theocritus, Plotinus, and the Septuagint one moves on intermediate levels which are those of race as much as anything —
like saying Copt, Greek and Jew or Moslem, Turk and Armenian.
… Am I wrong? These are the slow accretions of time itself on place. Just as life on the individual face lays down, wash by suc-cessive wash, the wrinkles of experiences in which laughter and tears are utterly indistinguishable. Wormcasts of experience on the sands of life….’
So writes my friend, and he is right; for the Interlinear now raises for me much more than the problem of objective ‘truth to life’, or if you like ‘to fiction’. It raises, as life itself does — whether one makes or takes it — the harder-grained question of form. How then am I to manipulate this mass of crystallized data in order to work out the meaning of it and so give a coherent picture of this impossible city of love and obscenity?
I wish I knew. I wish I knew. So much has been revealed to me by all this that I feel myself to be, as it were, standing upon the threshold of a new book — a new Alexandria. The old evoca-tive outlines which I drew, intertwining them with the names of the city’s exemplars — Cavafy, Alexander, Cleopatra and the rest —
were subjective ones. I had made the image my own jealous personal property, and it was true yet only within the limitations of a truth only partially perceived. Now, in the light of all these new treasures — for truth, though merciless as love, must always be a treasure — what should I do? Extend the frontiers of original truth, filling in with the rubble of this new knowledge the foundations upon which to build a new Alexandria? Or should the dispositions remain the same, the characters remain the same — and is it only truth itself which has changed in con-tradiction?
All this spring on my lonely island I have been weighed down by this grotesque information, which has so altered my feelings about things — oddly enough even about things past. Can emotions be retrospective, retroactive?
So much I wrote was based upon Justine’s fears of Nessim —
genuine fears, genuinely expressed. I have seen with my own eyes that cold speechless jealousy upon his face — and seen the fear written on hers. Yet now Balthazar says that Nessim would never have done her harm. What am I to believe?
We dined so often together, the four of us; and there I sat speechless and drunk upon the memory of her actual kisses, be-lieving (only because she told me so) that the presence of the fourth — Pursewarden — would lull Nessim’s jealous brain and offer us the safety of chaperonage! Yet if now I am to believe Balthazar, it was I who was the decoy. (Do I remember, or only imagine, a special small smile which from time to time would appear at the corner of Pursewarden’s lips, perhaps cynical or per-haps comminatory?) I thought then that I was sheltering behind the presence of the writer while he was in fact sheltering