The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [394]
‘Silence’. The latch was hooked back.
Balthazar’s voice sounded strangely thin and far away as he bade me to enter. The shutters were drawn and the room was shrouded in half-darkness. He was lying in bed. I saw with a con-siderable shock that his hair was quite white which made him look like an ancient version of himself. It took me a moment or two to realize that it was not dyed. But how he had changed! One cannot exclaim to a friend: ‘My God, how much you have aged!’
Yet this is what I almost did, quite involuntarily.
‘Darley!’ he said feebly, and held up in welcome hands swollen to the size of boxing-gloves by the bandages which swathed them.
‘What on earth have you been doing to yourself?’
He drew a long sad sigh of vexation and nodded towards a chair. The room was in great disorder. A mountain of books and papers on the floor by the window. An unemptied chamberpot. A chessboard with the pieces all lying in confusion. A newspaper. A cheese-roll on a plate with an apple. The washbasin full of dirty plates. Beside him in a glass of some cloudy fluid stood a glittering pair of false teeth on which his feverish eye dwelt from time to time with confused perplexity. ‘You have heard nothing?
That surprises me. Bad news, news of a scandal, travels so fast and so far I should have thought that by now you had heard. It is a lon g story. Shall I tell you and provoke the look of tactful com-
miseration with which Mountolive sits down to play chess with me every afternoon?’
‘But your hands….’
‘I shall come to those in due course. It was a little idea I got from your manuscript. But the real culprits are these, I think, these false teeth in the glass. Don’t they glitter bewitchingly?
I am sure it was the teeth which set me off. When I found that I was about to lose my teeth I suddenly began to behave like a woman at the change of life. How else can I explain falling in love like a youth?’ He cauterized the question with a dazed laugh.
‘First the Cabal — which is now disbanded; it went the way of all words. Mystagogues arose, theologians, all the resourceful bigotry that heaps up around a sect and spells dogma! But the thing had to me a special meaning, a mistaken and unconscious meaning, but nevertheless a clear one. I thought that slowly, by degrees, I should be released from the bondage of my appetites, of the flesh. I should at last, I felt, find a philosophic calm and balance which would expunge the passional nature, sterilize my actions. I thought of course that I had no such prejugés at the time; that my quest for truth was quite pure. But unconsciously I was using the Cabal to this precise end — instead of letting it use me. First miscalculation! Pass me some water from the pitcher over there.’ He drank thirstily through his new pink gums. ‘Now comes the absurdity. I found I must lose my teeth. This caused the most frightful upheaval. It seemed to me like a death-sentence, like a confirmation of growing old, of getting beyond the reach of life itself. I have always been fastidious about mouths, always hated rank breath and coated tongues; but most of all false teeth! Un-consciously, then, I must have somehow pushed myself to this ridiculous thing — as if it were a last desperate fling before old age settled over me. Don’t laugh. I fell in love in a way that I have never done before, at least not since I was eighteen. “Kisses sharp as quills” says the proverb; or as Pursewarden might say
“Once more the cunning gonads on the prowl, the dragnet of the seed, the old biological terror”. But my dear Darley this was no joke. I still had my own teeth! But the object of my choice, a Greek actor, was the most disastrous that anyone could hit upon. To look like a god, to have a charm like a shower of silver arrows —
and yet to be simply a small-spirited, dirty, venal and empty