The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [208]
I see all of us not as men and women any longer, identities swollen with their acts of forgetfulness, follies, and deceits —
but as beings unconsciously made part of place, buried to the waist among the ruins of a single city, steeped in its values; like those creatures of whom Empedocles wrote ‘Solitary limbs wandered, seeking for union with one another,’ or in another place, ‘So it is that sweet lays hold of sweet, bitter rushes to bitter, acid comes to acid, warm couples with warm.’ All members of a city whose
actions lay just outside the scope of the plotting or conn iving spirit: Alexandrians.
Justine, lying back against a fallen column at Taposiris, dark head upon the darkness of the sighing water, one curl lifted by the sea-winds, saying: ‘In the whole of English only one phrase means something to me, the words “Time Immemorial”.’
Seen across the transforming screens of memory, how remote that forgotten evening seems. There was so much as yet left for us all to live through until we reached the occasion of the great duckshoot which so abruptly, concisely, precipitated the final change — and the disappearance of Justine herself. But all this belongs to another Alexandria — one which I created in my mind and which the great Interlinear of Balthazar has, if not destroyed, changed out of all recognition.
‘To intercalate realities’ writes Balthazar ‘is the only way to be faithful to Time, for at every moment in Time the possibilities are endless in their multiplicity. Life consists in the act of choice. The perpetual reservations of judgement and the perpetual choosing.’
From the vantage-point of this island I can see it all in its doubleness, in the intercalation of fact and fancy, with new eyes; and re-reading, re-working reality in the light of all I now know, I am surprised to find that my feelings themselves have changed, have grown, have deepened even. Perhaps then the destruction of my private Alexandria was necessary (‘the artifact of a true work of art never shows a plane surface’); perhaps buried in all this there lies the germ and substance of a truth — time’s usufruct — which, if I can accommodate it, will carry me a little further in what is really a search for my proper self. We shall see.
* * * * *
XIII
lea and her old father, whom she worships. White-haired, erect, with a sort of haunted pity in his eyes for C
the young unmarried goddess he has fathered. Once a
year, however, on New Year’s eve, they dance at the Cecil, stately, urbanely. He waltzes like a clockwork man.’ Somewhere I once wrote down these words. They bring to mind another scene, another sequence of events.
The old scholar comes to sit at my table. He has a particular weakness for me, I do not know why, but he always talks to me with humorous modesty as we sit and watch his beautiful daughter move around the room in the arms of an admirer, so graceful and so composed. ‘There is so much of the schoolgirl still about her —
or the artist. Tonight her cape had some wine on it so she put a mackintosh over her ball gown and ate the toffees which she found in the pockets. I don’t know what her mother would say if she were alive.’ We drank quietly and watched the coloured lights flickering among the dancers. He said ‘I feel like an old procurer. Always looking out for someone to marry her…. Her happiness seems so important, somehow … I am going the right way about to spoil it I know, by meddling … yet I can’t leave it alone …
I’ve scraped a dowry together over the years…. The money burns my pocket…. When I see a nice Englishman like you my instinct is to say: “For God’s sake take her and look after her.”
… It has been a bitter pleasure bringing her up without a mother. Eh? No fool like an old fool.’ And he walks stiffly away to the bar, smiling.
Presently that evening Clea herself came and