The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [60]
leather cases, over the martial array of philosophers. Kant in his nightcap feeling his way upstairs. Jupiter Tonans. There is some-how a heavy futility in this array of great ones — among whom she has permitted Pursewarden an appearance. Four of his novels are to be seen though whether she has put them there specially for the occasion (we are all dining together) I cannot say. Justine surrounded by her philosophers is like an invalid surrounded by medicines — empty capsules, bottles and syringes. ‘Kiss her’ says Arnauti ‘and you are aware that her eyes do not close but open more widely, with an increasing doubt and madness. The mind is so awake that it makes any gift of the body partial — a panic which will respond to nothing less than a curette. At night you can hear her brain ticking like a cheap alarm-clock.’
On the far wall there is an idol the eyes of which are lit from within by electricity, and it is to this graven mentor that Justine acts her private role. Imagine a torch thrust through the throat of a skeleton to light up the vault of the skull from which the eyeless sockets ponder. Shadows thrown on the arch of the cranium flap there in imprisonment. When the electricity is out of order a stump of candle is soldered to the bracket: Justine then, standing naked on tip-toes to push a lighted match into the eyeball of the God. Immediately the furrows of the jaw spring into relief, the shaven frontal bone, the straight rod of the nose. She has never been tranquil unless this visitant from distant mythology is watch-ing over her nightmares. Under it he a few small inexpensive toys, a celluloid doll, a sailor, about which I have never had the courage to question her. It is to this idol that her most marvellous dialogues are composed. It is possible, she says, to talk in her sleep and be overheard by the wise and sympathetic mask which has come to represent what she calls her Noble Self — add ing sadly, with a smile of misgiving, ‘It does exist you know.’
The pages of Arnauti run through my mind as I watch her and talk to her. ‘A face famished by the inward light of her terrors. In the darkness long after I am asleep she wakes to ponder on some-thing I have said about our relationship. I am always waking to find her busy with something, preoccupied; sitting before the mirror naked, smoking a cigarette, and tapping with her bare foot on the expensive carpet.’ It is strange that I should always see Justine in the context of this bedroom which she could never have
known before Nessim gave it to her. It is always here that I see her undergoing those dreadful intimacies of which he writes. ‘There is no pain compared to that of loving a woman who makes her body accessible to one and yet who is incapable of delivering her true self — because she does not know where to find it.’ How often, lying beside her, I have debated these observations which, to the ordinary reader, might pass unnoticed in the general flux and reflux of ideas in Moeurs.
She does not slide from kisses into sleep — a door into a private garden — as Melissa does. In the warm bronze light her pale skin looks paler — the red eatable flowers growing in the cheeks where the light sinks and is held fast. She will throw back her dress to un-roll her stocking and show you the dark cicatrice above the knee, lodged between the twin dimples of the suspender. It is indescrib-able the feeling I have when I see this wound — like a character out of the book — and recall its singular origin. In the mirror the dark head, younger and more graceful now than the original it has outlived, gives back a vestigial image of a young Justine — like the calcimined imprint of a fern in chalk: the youth she