The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [286]
‘The girl made several attempts to give him the slip but he stuck to her and insisted on taking her home in one of those old horse-drawn cabs. She was almost beside herself, indeed, and when they reached the eastern end of the city, somewhat shabby and unfrequented, with large abandoned properties and decaying gardens, she made a run for it. Demented with romantic frenzy, Amaril chased the nymph and caught her up as she was slipping into a dark courtyard. In his eagerness he snatched at her cowl when the creature, her face at last bared, sank to the doorstep in tears. Amaril’s description of the scene was rather terrifying. She sat there, shaken by a sort of snickering and whimpering and covering her face with her hands. She had no nose. For a moment he got a tremendous fright for he is the most superstitious of mortals, and knows all the beliefs about vampires appearing during carnival. But he made the sign of the cross and touched the clove of garlic in his pocket — but she didn’t disappear. And then the doctor in him came to the fore, and taking her into the courtyard (she was half-faint ing with mortification and fear) he examined her closely He tells me he heard his own brain ticking out possible diagnoses clearly and watchfully, while at the same time he felt that his heart had stopped beating and that he was suffocating…. In a flash he reviewed the possible causes of such a feature, repeating with terror words like syphilis, leprosy, lupus, and turning her small distorted face this way and that. He cried angrily: “What is your name?” And she blurted out “Semira —
the virtuous Semira.” He was so unnerved that he roared with laughter.
‘Now this is an oddity. Semira is the daughter of a very old deaf father. The family was once rich and famous, under the Khedives, and is of Ottoman extraction. But it was plagued by misfortunes
and the progressive insanity of the sons, and has so far today decayed as to be virtually forgotten. It is also poverty-stricken. The old half-mad father locked Semira away in this rambling house, keeping her veiled for the most part. Vaguely, in society, one had heard tales of her — of a daughter who had taken the veil and spent her life in prayer, who had never been outside the gates of the house, who was a mystic; or who was deaf, dumb and bed-ridden. Vague tales, distorted as tales always are in Alexandria. But while the faint echo remained of the so-called virtuous Semira — she was really completely unknown to us and her family forgotten. Now it seemed that at carnival-time her curiosity about the outer world overcame her and she gate-crashed parties in a domino!
‘But I am forgetting Amaril. Their footsteps had brought down an old manservant with a candle. Amaril demanded to see the master of the house. He had already come to a decision. The old father lay asleep in an old-fashioned four-poster bed, in a room covered in bat-droppings, at the top of the house. Semira was by now practically insensible. But Amaril had come to a great decision. Taking the candle in one hand and the small Semira in the crook of his arm, he walked the whole way up to the top and kicked open the door of the father’s room. It must have been a strange and unfamiliar scene for the old man to witness as he sat up in bed — and Amaril describes it with all the touching flam-boyance of the romantic, even moving himself in the recital so that he is in tears as he recalls it. He is touched by the magnificence of his own fancy, I think; I must say, loving him as much as I do, I felt tears coming into my own eyes as he told me how he put down the candle beside the bed, and kneeling down with Semira, said
“I wish to marry your daughter and take her back into the world.”
The terror and incomprehension of the old man at this unexpected visit took some time to wear off, and for a while it was hard to make him understand. Then he began to tremble and wonder at