The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [5]
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At that epoch, Georges-Gaston Pombal, a minor consular official, shares a small flat with me in the Rue Nebi Daniel. He is a rare figure among the diplomats in that he appears to possess a vertebral column. For him the tiresome treadmill of protocol and entertainment — so like a surrealist nightmare — is full of exotic charm. He sees diplomacy through the eyes of a Douanier Rousseau. He indulges himself with it but never allows it to engulf what remains of his intellect. I suppose the secret of his success is his tremendous idleness, which almost approaches the supernatural. He sits at his desk in the Consulate-General covered by a per-petual confetti of pasteboard cards bearing the names of his col-leagues. He is a pegamoid sloth of a man, a vast slow fellow given to prolonged afternoon siestas and Crébillon fils. His handkerchiefs smell wondrously of Eau de Portugal. His most favoured topic of conversation is women, and he must speak from experience for the succession of visitors to the little flat is endless, and rarely does one see the same face twice. ‘To a Frenchman the love here is interesting. They act before they reflect. When the time comes to doubt, to suffer remorse, it is too hot, nobody has the energy. It lacks finesse, this animalism, but it suits me. I’ve worn out my heart and head with love, and want to be left alone — above all, mon cher,
from this Judeo-Coptic mania for dissection, for analysing the sub-ject. I want to return to my farmhouse in Normandy heart-whole.’
For long periods of the winter he is away on leave and I have the little dank flat to myself and sit up late, correcting exercise books, with only the snoring Hamid for company. In this last
year I have reached a dead-end in myself. I lack the will-power to do anything with my life, to better my position by hard work, to write: even to make love. I do not know what has come over me. This is the first time I have experienced a real failure of the will to survive. Occasionally I turn over a bundle of manuscript or an old proof-copy of a novel or book of poems with dis-gusted inattention; with sadness, like someone studying an old passport.
From time to time one of Georges’ numerous girls strays into my net by calling at the flat when he is not there, and the incident serves for a while to sharpen my taedium vitae. Georges is thought-ful and generous in these matters for, before going away (knowing how poor I am) he often pays one of the Syrians from Golfo’s tavern in advance, and orders her to spend an occasional night in the flat en disponibilité, as he puts it. Her duty is to cheer me up, by no means an enviable task especially as on the surface there is nothing to indicate lack of cheerfulness on my part. Small talk has become a useful form of automatism which goes on long after one has lost the need to talk; if necessary I can even make love with relief, as one does not sleep very well here: but without passion, without attention.
Some of these encounters with poor exhausted creatures driven to extremity by physical want are interesting, even touching, but I have lost any interest in sorting my emotions so that they exist for me like dimensionless figures flashed on a screen. ‘There are only three things to be done with a woman’ said Clea once. ‘You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.’ I was ex-periencing a failure in all these domains of feeling. I record this only to show the unpromising human material upon which Melissa elected to work, to blow some breath of life into my nostrils. It could not have been easy for her to bear the