The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [41]
‘Who did Justine love before Arnauti?’
‘I cannot remember. You know many of Justine’s lovers re-mained her friends; but more often I think you could say that her truest friends were never lovers. The town is always ready to gossip.’
But I was thinking of a passage in Moeurs where Justine comes to meet him with a man who is her lover. Arnauti writes: ‘She embraced this man, her lover, so warmly in front of me, kissing him on the mouth and eyes, his cheeks, even his hands, that I was puzzled. Then it shot through me with a thrill that it was really me she was kissing in her imagination.’
Balthazar said quietly: ‘Thank God I have been spared an undue interest in love. At least the invert escapes this fearful struggle to give oneself to another. Lying with one’s own kind, enjoying an ex-perience, one can still keep free the part of one’s mind which dwells in Plato, or gardening, or the differential calculus. Sex has left the body and entered the imagination now; that is why Arnauti suf-fered so much with Justine, because she preyed upon all that he
might have kept separate — his artist-hood if you like. He is when all is said and done a sort of minor Antony, and she a Cleo. You can read all about it in Shakespeare. And then, as far as Alexan-dria is concerned, you can understand why this is really a city of incest — I mean that here the cult of Serapis was founded. For this etiolation of the heart and reins in love-making must make one turn inwards upon one’s sister. The lover mirrors himself like Narcissus in his own family: there is no exit from the predicament.’
All this was not very comprehensible to me, yet vaguely I felt a sort of correspondence between the associations he employed; and certainly much of what he said seemed to — not explain, but to offer a frame to the picture of Justine — the dark, vehement creature in whose direct and energetic handwriting I had first read this quotation from Laforgue: ‘Je n’ai pas une jeune fille qui saurait me goûter. Ah! oui, une garde-malade! Une garde-malade pour l’amour de l’art, ne donnant ses baisers qu’à des mourants, des gens in extremis…. ’ Under this she wrote: ‘Often quoted by A and at last discovered by accident in Laforgue.’
‘Have you fallen out of love with Melissa?’ said Balthazar sud-denly. ‘I do not know her. I have only seen her. Forgive me. I have hurt you.’
It was at this time that I was becoming aware of how much Melissa was suffering. But not a word of reproach ever escaped her lips, nor did she ever speak of Justine. But she had taken on a lacklustre, unloved colour — her very flesh; and paradoxically enough though I could hardly make love to her without an effort, yet I felt myself at this time to be more deeply in love with her than ever. I was gnawed by a confusion of feelings and a sense of frustration which I had never experienced before; it made me sometimes angry with her.
It was so different from Justine, who was experienc ing much the same confusion as myself between her ideas and her intentions, when she said: ‘Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me, and then show me the place where he was hanged.’
* * * * *
Of the Cabal itself, what is there to be said? Alexandria is a town of sects and gospels. And for every ascetic she has always
thrown up one religious libertine — Carpocrates, Anthony — who was prepared to founder in the senses as deeply and truly as any desert father in the mind. ‘You speak slightingly of syncretism’
said Balthazar once, ‘but you must understand that to work here at all — and I am speaking now as a religious maniac not a philo-sopher — one must try to reconcile two extremes of habit and behaviour which are not due to the intellectual disposition of the inhabitants, but to their soil, air, landscape. I mean extreme sen-suality and intellectual asceticism.