The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [392]
I made room for her listlessly, still half asleep. She wept and trembled and muttered for a long time before I was able to quieten her. But at last she fell asleep with her dark head on the pillow beside me.
I lay awake for a long time to taste, with perplexity and wonder, the disgust that had now surged up in me, blotting out every other
feeling. From where had it come? The perfume! The unbearable perfume and the smell of her body. Some lines from a poem of Pursewarden’s drifted through my mind.
Delivered by her to what drunken caresses,
Of mouths half eaten like soft rank fruit,
From which one takes a single bite
A mouthful of the darkness where we bleed.
The once magnificent image of my love lay now in the hollow of my arm, defenceless as a patient on an operating table, hardly breathing. It was useless even to repeat her name which once held so much fearful magic that it had the power to slow the blood in my veins. She had become a woman at last, lying there, soiled and tattered, like a dead bird in a gutter, her hands crumpled into claws. It was as if some huge iron door had closed forever in my heart. I could hardly wait for that slow dawn to bring me release. I could hardly wait to be gone.
* * * * *
IV
alking about the streets of the summer capital once
more, walking by spring sunlight, and a cloudless
W skirmishing blue sea — half-asleep and half-awake —
I felt like the Adam of the medieval legends: the world-com-pounded body of a man whose flesh was soil, whose bones were stones, whose blood water, whose hair was grass, whose eyesight sunlight, whose breath was wind, and whose thoughts were clouds. And weightless now, as if after some long wasting illness, I found myself turned adrift again to float upon the shallows of Mareotis with its old tide-marks of appetites and desires refunded into the history of the place: an ancient city with all its cruelties intact, pitched upon a desert and a lake. Walking down the remembered grooves of streets which extended on every side, radiating out like the arms of a starfish from the axis of its founder’s tomb. Footfalls echoing in the memory, forgotten scenes and conver-sations springing up at me from the walls, the café tables, the shuttered rooms with cracked and peeling ceilings. Alexandr ia,
princess and whore. The royal city and the anus mundi. She would never change so long as the races continued to seethe here like must in a vat; so long as the streets and squares still gushed and spouted with the fermentation of these diverse passions and spites, rages and sudden calms. A fecund desert of human loves littered with the whitening bones of its exiles. Tall palms and minarets marrying in the sky. A hive of white mansions flanking those narrow and abandoned streets of mud which were racked all night by Arab music and the cries of girls who so easily disposed of their body’s wearisome baggage (which galled them) and offered to the night the passionate kisses which money could not dis-flavour. The sadness and beatitude of this human conjunction which perpetuated itself to eternity, an endless cycle of rebirth and annihilation which alone could teach and reform by its des-tructive power. (‘One makes love only to confirm one’s loneliness’
said Pursewarden, and at another time Justine added like a coda
‘A woman’s best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying’ as she turned an immemorial head on a high balcony, hanging above a lighted city where the leaves of the trees seemed painted by the electric signs, where the pigeons tumbled as if from shelves….) A great honeycomb of faces and gestures.
‘We become what we dream’ said Balthazar, still hunting among these grey paving stones for the key to a watch which is Time.
‘We achieve in reality, in substance, only the pictures of the imagination.’ The city makes no answer to such propositions. Unheeding it coils