The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [87]
certainly for very little more. Here again to those who did not know him nothing was obvious. Yet the delusions multiplied them-selves at such a rate that in his own records they give one the illusion of watching bacteria under a microscope — the pullulation of healthy cells, as in cancer, which have gone off their heads, renounced their power to repress themselves.
The mysterious series of code messages transmitted by the street names he encountered showed definite irrefutable signs of a supernatural agency at work full of the threat of unseen punish
ment — though whether for himself or for others he could not tell. Balthazar’s treatise lying withering in the window of a bookshop and the same day coming upon his father’s grave in the Jewish cemetery — with those distinguishing names engraved upon the stone which echoed all the melancholy of European Jewry in exile. Then the question of noises in the room next door: a sort of heavy breathing and the sudden simultaneous playing of three pianos. These, he knew, were not delusions but links in an occult chain, logical and persuasive only to the mind which had passed beyond the frame of causality. It was becoming harder and harder to pretend to be sane by the standards of ordinary behaviour. He was going through the Devastatio described by Swedenborg. The coal fires had taken to burning into extraordinary shapes. This could be proved by relighting them over and over again to verify his find ings — terrifying landscapes and faces. The mole on Justine’s wrist was also troubling. At meal times he fought against his desire to touch it so feverishly that he turned pale and almost fainted.
One afternoon a crumpled sheet began breathing and continued for a space of about half an hour, assuming the shape of the body it covered. One night he woke to the soughing of great wings and saw a bat-like creature with the head of a violin resting upon the bedrail.
Then the counter-agency of the powers of good — a message brought by a ladybird which settled on the notebook in which he was writing; the music of Weber’s Pan played every day between three and four on a piano in an adjoining house. He felt that his mind had become a battle-ground for the forces of good and evil and that his task was to strain every nerve to recognize them, but it was not easy. The phenomenal world had begun to play tricks on him so that his senses were beginning to accuse reality itself of inconsistency. He was in peril of a mental overthrow. Once his waistcoat started ticking as it hung on the back of a chair, as if inhabited by a colony of foreign heartbeats. But when investigated it stopped and refused to continue for the benefit of Selim whom he had called into the room. The same day he saw his initials in gold upon a cloud reflected in a shop-window in the Rue St Saba. Everything seemed proved by this.
That same week a stranger was seated in the corner always re-served for Balthazar in the Café Al Aktar sipping an arak — the arak he had intended to order. The figure bore a strong yet distorted resemblance to himself as he turned in the mirror, unfold-ing his lips from white teeth in a smile. He did not wait but hurried to the door.
As he walked the length of the Rue Fuad he felt the entire pave-ment turn to sponge beneath his feet; he was foundering waist-deep in it before the illusion vanished. At two-thirty that afternoon he rose from a feverish sleep, dressed and set off to confirm an overpowering intuition that both Pastroudi and the Café Dordali were empty. They were, and the fact filled him with triumphant relief; but it was short-lived, for on returning to his room he felt all of a sudden as if his heart were being expelled from his body by the short mechanical movements