The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [491]
‘Well’ I said, ‘Balthazar. Keep out of mischief.’
‘We’ll be meeting again qu ite soon’ he said quietly. ‘You can’t shake me off. The Wandering Jew, you know. But I’ll keep you posted about Clea. I’d say something like “Come back to us soon”, if I didn’t have the feeling that you weren’t going to. I’m damned if I know why. But that we’ll meet again I’m sure.’
‘So am I’ I said.
We embraced warmly, and with an abrupt gesture he climbed back into the gharry and settled himself once more.
‘Mark my words’ he said as the horse started up to the flick of a whip.
I stood, listening to the noise of its hooves until the night swallowed them up. Then I turned back to the work in hand.
* * * * *
X
earest Clea:
Three long months and no word from you. I would
D have been very much disquieted had not the faithful Balthazar sent me his punctual postcard every few days to report so favourably on your progress: though of course he gives me no details. You for your part must have grown increasingly angry at my callous silence which you so little deserve. Truthfully, I am bitterly ashamed of it. I do not know what curious inhibition has been holding me back. I have been unable either to analyse it or to react against it effectively. It has been like a handle of a door which won’t turn. Why? It is doubly strange because I have been deeply conscious of you all the time, of you being active ly present in my thoughts. I’ve been holding you, metaphorically, cool against my throbbing mind like a knife-blade. Is it possible that I enjoyed you better as a thought than as a person alive, acting in the world? Or was it that words themselves seemed so empty a consolation for the distance which has divided us? I do not know. But now that the job is nearly completed I seem sud-denly to have found my tongue. Things alter their focus on this little island. You called it a metaphor once, I remember, but it is very much a reality to me
— though of course vastly changed from the little haven I knew before. It is our own invasion which has changed it. You could hardly imagine that ten technicians could make such a change. But we have imported money, and with it are slowly altering the economy of the place, displacing labour at inflated prices, creating all sorts of new needs of which the lucky inhabitants were not conscious before. Needs which in the last analysis will destroy the tightly woven fabric of this feudal village with its tense blood-relationships, its feuds and archaic festivals. Its wholeness will dissolve under these alien pressures. It was so tightly woven, so beautiful and symmetrical like a swallow’s nest. We are picking it apart like idle boys, unaware of the damage we inflict. It seems inescapable the death we bring to the old order without wishing it. It is simply done too — a few steel girders, some digging
equipment, a crane! Suddenly things begin to alter shape. A new cupidity is born. It will start quietly with a few barbers’ shops, but will end by altering the whole architecture of the port. In ten years it will be an unrecognizable jumble of warehouses, dance-halls and brothels for merchant sailors. Only give us enough time!
The site which they chose for the relay station is on the mountainous eastward side of the island, and not where I lived before. I am rather glad of this in an obscure sort of way. I am sentimental enough about old memories to enjoy them — but how much better they seem in the light of a small shift of gravity; they are renewed and refreshed all at once. Moreover this corner of the island is unlike any other part — a