The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [296]
They played with each other, counterfeiting a desultory passion which mocked its own origins, could neither ignite nor extinguish itself. (You can lie with lips apart, legs apart, for numberless eternities, telling yourself it is something you have forgotten, it is
on the tip of your tongue, the edge of your mind. For the life of you you cannot remember what it is, the name, the town, the day, the hour … the biological memory fails.) She gave a small sniff, as if she were crying, holding him in those pale, reflective fingers, tenderly as one might hold a fledgling fallen from the nest. Ex-pressions of doubt and anxiety flitted across her face — as if she were herself guilty for the failure of the current, the broken communication. Then she groaned — and he knew that she was thinking of the money. Such a large sum! His improvidence could never be repeated by other men! And now her crude solicitude, her roughness began to make him angry.
‘ Chéri. ’ Their embraces were like the dry conjunction of wax-works, of figures modelled in gesso for some classical tomb. Her hands moved now charmlessly upon the barrel-vaulting of his ribs, his loins, his throat, his cheek; her fingers pressing here and there in darkness, linger of the blind seeking a secret panel in a wall, a forgotten switch which would slide back, illuminate another world, out of time. It was useless, it seemed. She gazed wildly around her. They lay under a nightmarish window full of sealight, against which a single curtain moved softly like a sail, reminding her of Darley’s bed. The room was full of the smell of stale joss, decomposing manuscripts, and the apples he ate while he worked. The sheets were dirty.
As usual, at a level far below the probings of self-disgust or humiliation, he was writing, swiftly and smoothly in his clear mind. He was covering sheet upon sheet of paper. For so many years now he had taken to writing out his life in his own mind
— the living and the writing were simultaneous. He transferred the moment bodily to paper as it was lived, warm from the oven, naked and exposed….
‘Now’ she said angrily, determined not to lose the piastres which in her imagination she had already spent, already owed,
‘now I will make you La Veuve’ and he drew his breath in an exultant literary thrill to hear once more this wonderful slang expression stolen from the old nicknames of the French guillo-tine, with its fearful suggestion of teeth reflected in the concealed metaphor for the castration complex. La Veuve! The shark-infested seas of love which closed over the doomed sailor’s head in a voiceless paralysis of the dream, the deep-sea dream which
dragged one slowly downwards, dismembered and dismembering
… until with a vulgar snick the steel fell, the clumsy thinking head (‘use your loaf) smacked dully into the basket to spurt and wriggle like a fish…. ‘ Mon coeur’ he said hoarsely, ‘ mon ange’;
simply to taste the commonest of metaphors, hunting through them a tenderness lost, torn up, cast aside among the snows.
‘ Mon ange. ’ A sea-widow into something rich and strange!
Suddenly she cried out in exasperation : ‘Ah God! But what is it? You do not want to?’ her voice ending almost in a wail. She took his soft rather womanish hand upon her knee and spread it out like a book, bending over it a despairing curious face. She moved the candle the better to study the lines, drawing up her thin legs. Her hair fell about her face. He touched the rosy light on her shoulder and said mockingly ‘You tell fortunes.’ But she did not look up. She answered shortly ‘Everyone in the city tells fortunes.’ They stayed like this, like a tableau,