The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [369]
history of that collective anecdote, the human mind; when the past is dead and the future represented only by desire and fear, what of that adventive moment which can’t be measured, can’t be dismissed? For most of us the so-called Present is snatched away like some sumptuous repast, conjured up by fairies — before one can touch a mouthful. Like the dead Pursewarden I hoped I might soon be truthfully able to say: ‘I do not write for those who have never asked themselves this question : “at what point does real life begin?”‘
Idle thoughts passing through the mind as I lay on a flat rock above the sea, eating an orange, perfectly circumscribed by a solitude which would soon be engulfed by the city, the ponderous azure dream of Alexandria basking like some old reptile in the bronze Pharaonic light of the great lake. The master-sensualists of history abandoning their bodies to mirrors, to poems, to the grazing flocks of boys and women, to the needle in the vein, to the opium-pipe, to the death-in-life kisses without appetite. Walking those streets again in my imagination I knew once more that they spanned, not merely human history, but the whole biological scale of the heart’s affections — from the painted ecstasies of Cleopatra (strange that the vine should be discovered here, near Taposiris) to the bigotry of Hypatia (withered vine-leaves, martyr’s kisses). And stranger visitors: Rimbaud, student of the Abrupt Path, walked here with a belt full of gold coins. And all those other swarthy dream-interpreters and politicians and eunuchs were like a flock of birds of brilliant plumage. Between pity, desire and dread, I saw the city once more spread out before me, inhabited by the faces of my friends and subjects. I knew that I must re-experience it once more and this time forever. Yet it was to be a strange departure, full of small unforeseen elements — I mean the messenger being a hunchback in a silver suit, a flower in his lapel, a perfumed handkerchief in his sleeve!
And the sudden springing to life of the little village which had for so long tactfully ignored our very existence, save for an occasional gift of fish or wine or coloured eggs which Athena brought us, folded in her red shawl. She, too, could hardly bear to see us go; her stern old wrinkled mask crumpled into tears over each item of our slender baggage. But ‘They will not let you leave without
a hospitality’ she repeated stubbornly. ‘The village will not let you go like that.’ We were to be offered a farewell banquet!
As for the child I had conducted the whole rehearsal of this journey (of her whole life, in truth) in images from a fairy story. Many repetitions had not staled it. She would sit staring up at the painting and listening attentively. She was more than prepared for it all, indeed almost ravenous to take up her own place in the gallery of images I had painted for her. She had soaked up all the confused colours of this fanciful world to which she had once belonged by right and which she would now recover — a world peopled by those presences — the father, a dark pirate-prince, the stepmother a swarthy imperious queen….
‘She is like the playing-card?’
‘Yes. The Queen of Spades.’
‘And her name is Justine.’
‘Her name is Justine.’
‘In the picture she is smoking. Will she love me more than my father or less?’
‘She will love you both.’
There had been no other way to explain it to her, except in terms of myth or allegory — the poetry of infant uncertainty. I had made her word-perfect in this parable of an Egypt which was to throw up for her (enlarged to the size of gods or magi) the portraits of her family, of her ancestors. But then is not life itself a fairy-tale which we lose the power of apprehending as we grow?
No matter. She was already drunk upon the image of her father.
‘Yes, I understand everything.’ With a nod and a sigh she would store up these painted images in the treasure-box of her mind.