The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [6]
For weeks her lover, the old furrier, followed me about the streets with a pistol sagging in the pocket of his overcoat. It was consoling to learn from one of Melissa’s friends that it was un-loaded, but it was nevertheless alarming to be haunted by this old
man. Mentally we must have shot each other down at every street corner of the city. I for my part could not bear to look at that heavy pock-marked face with its bestial saturnine cluster of tor-mented features smeared on it — could not bear to think of his gross intimacies with her: those sweaty little hands covered as thickly as a porcupine with black hair. For a long time this went on and then after some months an extraordinary feeling of intimacy seemed to grow up between us. We nodded and smiled at each other when we met. Once, encountering him at a bar, I stood for nearly an hour beside him; we were on the point of talking to each other, yet somehow neither of us had the courage to begin it. There was no common subject of conversation save Melissa. As I was leaving I caught a glimpse of him in one of the long mirrors, his head bowed as he stared into the wineglass. Something about his attitude — the clumsy air of a trained seal grappling with human emotions — struck me, and I realized for the first time that he probably loved Melissa as much as I did. I pitied his ugliness, and the blank pained incomprehension with which he faced emotions so new to him as jealousy, the deprivation of a cherished mistress.
Afterwards when they were turning out his pockets I saw among the litter of odds and ends a small empty scent-bottle of the cheap kind that Melissa used; and I took it back to the flat where it stayed on the mantelpiece for some months before it was thrown away by Hamid in the course of a spring-clean. I never told Melissa of this; but often when I was alone at night while she was dancing, perhaps of necessity sleeping with her admirers, I studied this small bottle, sadly and passionately reflecting on this horrible old man’s love and measuring it against my own; and tasting too, vicariously, the desperation which makes one clutch at some small discarded object which is still impregnated with the betrayer’s memory.
I found Melissa, washed up like a half-drowned bird, on the dreary littorals of Alexandria, with her sex broken….
* * * * *
Streets that run back from the docks with their tattered rotten supercargo of houses, breathing into each others’ mouths, keeling
over. Shuttered balconies swarming with rats, and old women whose hair is full of the blood of ticks. Peeling walls leaning drunkenly to east and west of their true centre of gravity. The black ribbon of flies attaching itself to the lips and eyes of the children — the moist beads of summer flies everywhere; the very weight of their bodies snapping off ancient flypapers hanging in the violet doors of booths and cafés. The smell of the sweat-lathered Berberinis, like that of some decomposing stair-carpet. And then the street noises: shriek and clang of the water-bearing Saidi, dashing his metal cups together as an advertisement, the unheeded shrieks which pierce the hubbub from time to time, as of some small delicately-organized animal being disembowelled. The sores like ponds — the incubation of a human misery of such proportions that one is aghast, and all one’s feelings overflow into disgust and terror.
I wished I could imitate the self-confident directness with which Justine threaded her way through these streets towards the café
where I waited for her: El Bab. The doorway by the shattered arch where in all innocence we sat and talked; but already our con-versation had become impregnated by understandings which we took for the lucky omens of friendship merely. On that dun mud floor, feeling the quickly cooling cylinder of the earth dip towards the darkness,