The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [196]
again, write again!” He spent all that day at his papers, and at night-fall set off, cloaked, in his gondola. It was not my business to say anything. The next day once more I found him, pale and deathly tired. He had a high fever, and again these terrible bites. But he could not speak of his experience without weeping — tears of love and exhaustion. And it was now that he had begun his great poem which begins — you all know it ——
“Lips not on lips, but on each other’s wounds
Must suck the envenomed bodies of the loved
And through the tideless blood draw nourishment
To feed the love that feeds upon their deaths…. ”
‘The follow ing week I left for Ravenna where I had some studies to make for a book I was writing and where I stayed two months. I heard nothing from my host, but I got a letter from his sister to say that he was ill with a wasting disease which the doctors could not diagnose and that the family was much worried because he ins isted on going out at night in his gondola on journeys of which he would not speak but from which he returned utterly exhausted. I did not know what to reply to this.
‘From Ravenna, I went down to Greece and it was not until the following autumn that I returned. I had sent a card to Negroponte saying I hoped to stay with him, but had no reply. As I came down the Grand Canal a funeral was setting off in choppy water, by twilight, with the terrible plumes and emblems of death. I saw that they were coming from the Negroponte Palazzo. I landed and ran to the gates just as the last gondola in the procession was filling up with mourners and priests. I recognized the doctor and joined him in the boat, and as we rowed stiffly across the canal, dashed with spray and blinking at the stabs of lightning, he told me what he knew. Negroponte had died the day before. When they came to lay out the body, they found the bites: perhaps of some tropical insect?
The doctor was vague. “The only such bites I have seen” he said,
“were during the plague of Naples when the rats had been at the bodies. They were so bad we had to dust him down with talcum powder before we could let his sister see the body.”
Pursewarden took a long sip from his glass and went on wickedly.
‘The story does not end there; for I should tell you how I tried to avenge him, and went myself at night to the Bridge of the Footpads
— where according to the gondolier this woman always waited in
the shadow…. But it is getting late, and anyway, I haven’t made up the rest of the story as yet.’
There was a good deal of laughter and Athena gave a well-bred shudder, drawing her shawl across her shoulders. Narouz had been listening ope n-mouthed, with reeling senses, to this recital: he was spellbound. ‘But’ he stammered ‘is all this true?’ Fresh laughter greeted his question.
‘Of course it’s true’ said Pursewarden severely, and added: ‘I have never been in Venice in my life.’
And he rose, for it was time for them to be going, and while the impassive black servants waited they put on the velveteen capes and adjusted their masks like the actors they were, comparing their ident ical reflections as they stood side by side in the two swollen mirrors among the palms. Giggles from Pierre and sallies of wit from Toto de Brunel; and so they stepped laughing into the clear night air, the inquisitors of pleasure and pain, the Alexandrians…. The cars engulfed them while the solicitous domestics and chauffeurs tucked them in, carefully as bales of precious merchan-dise or spices, tenderly as flowers. ‘I feel fragile’ squeaked Toto at these attentions. ‘This side up with care, eh? Which side up, I ask myself?’ He must have been the only person in the city not to know the answer to his