The blue night was hoary with stars and the attentive desert stretched away on either side with its grotesque amphitheatres — like the empty rooms in some great cloud-mansion. The moon was late and wan tonight, the air still, the dunes windcarved. ‘What are you thinking?’ said my lover.
What was I thinking? Of a passage in Proclus which says that Orpheus ruled over the silver race, meaning those who led a
‘silver’ life; on Balthazar’s mantelpiece presumably among the pipe-cleaners and the Indian wood-carving of monkeys which neither saw, spoke nor heard evil, under a magic pentacle from Pythagoras. What was I thinking? The foetus in its waxen wallet, the locust squatting in the horn of the wheat, an Arab quoting a proverb which reverberated in the mind. ‘The memory of man is as old as misfortune.’ The quails from the burst cage spread upon the ground softly like honey, having no idea of escape. In the Scent Bazaar the flavour of Persian lilac.
‘Fourteen thousand years ago’ I said aloud, ‘Vega in Lyra was the Pole Star. Look at her where she burns.’ The beloved head turned with its frowning deep-set eyes and once more I see the long boats drawing in to the Pharos, the tides running, the minarets a-glitter with dew; noise of the blind Hodja crying in the voice of a mole assaulted by sunlight; a shufflepad of a camel-train clumping to a festival carrying dark lanterns.
An Arab woman makes my bed, beating the pillows till they fluff out like white egg under a whisk; a passage in Pursewarden’s book which reads: ‘They looked at each other, aware that there was neither youth nor strength enough between them to prevent their separation.’ When Melissa was pregnant by Nessim Amaril could not perform the abortion Nessim so much desired because of her illness and her weak heart. ‘She may die anyway’ he said, and Nessim nodded curtly and took up his overcoat. But she did not die then, she bore the child….
Justine is quoting something in Greek which I do not recognize: Sand, dog-roses and white rocks Of Alexandria, the mariner’s seamarks, Some sprawling dunes falling and pouring Sand into water, water into sand, Never into the wine of exile Which stains the air it is poured through; Or a voice which stains the mind, Singing in Arabic: ‘A ship without a sail Is a woman without breasts.’ Only that. Only that.
We walked hand in hand across the soft sand-dunes, laboriously as insects, until we reached Taposiris with its rumble of shattered columns and capitals among the ancient weather-eroded seamarks.
(‘Reliques of sensation’ says Coleridge ‘may exist for an indefinite time in a latent state in the very same order in which they were impressed.’) Yes, but the order of the imagination is not that of memory. A faint wind blew off the sea from the Grecian archipelago. The sea was smooth as a human cheek. Only at the edges it stirred and sighed. Those warm kisses remain there, amputated from before and after, existing in their own right like the frail transparencies of ferns or roses pressed between the covers of old books — unique and unfading as the memories of the city they exemplified and evoked: a plume of music from a forgotten carnival-guitar echoing on in the dark streets of Alexandria for as long as silence lasts….
I see all of us not as men and women any longer, identities swollen with their acts of forgetfulness, follies, and deceits — but as beings unconsciously made part of place, buried to the waist among the ruins of a single city, steeped in its values; like those creatures of whom Empedocles wrote ‘Solitary limbs wandered, seeking for union with one another,’ or in another place, ‘So it is that sweet lays hold of sweet, bitter rushes to bitter, acid comes to acid, warm couples with warm.’ All members of a city whose actions lay just outside the scope of the plotting or conniving spirit: Alexandrians.
Justine, lying back against a fallen column at Taposiris, dark head upon the darkness of the sighing water, one curl lifted by the sea-winds, saying: ‘In the whole of English only one phrase means something to me, the words “Time Immemorial”.’ Seen across the transforming screens of memory, how remote that forgotten evening seems. There was so much as yet left for us all to live through until we reached the occasion of the great duckshoot which so abruptly, concisely, precipitated the final change — and the disappearance of Justine herself. But all this belongs to another Alexandria — one which I created in my mind and which the great Interlinear of Balthazar has, if not destroyed, changed out of all recognition.
‘To intercalate realities’ writes Balthazar ‘is the only way to be faithful to Time, for at every moment in Time the possibilities are endless in their multiplicity. Life consists in the act of choice.
The perpetual reservations of judgement and the perpetual choosing.’ From the vantage-point of this island I can see it all in its doubleness, in the intercalation of fact and fancy, with new eyes; and re-reading, reworking reality in the light of all I now know, I am surprised to find that my feelings themselves have changed, have grown, have deepened even. Perhaps then the destruction of my private Alexandria was necessary (‘the artifact of a true work of art never shows a plane surface’); perhaps buried in all this there lies the germ and substance of a truth — time’s usufruct — which, if I can accommodate it, will carry me a little further in what is really a search for my proper self. We shall see.
*******
XIII
Clea and her old father, whom she worships. Whitehaired, erect, with a sort of haunted pity in his eyes for the young unmarried goddess he has fathered. Once a year, however, on New Year’s eve, they dance at the Cecil, stately, urbanely. He waltzes like a clockwork man.’ Somewhere I once wrote down these words. They bring to mind another scene, another sequence of events.
The old scholar comes to sit at my table. He has a particular weakness for me, I do not know why, but he always talks to me with humorous modesty as we sit and watch his beautiful daughter move around the room in the arms of an admirer, so graceful and so composed. ‘There is so much of the schoolgirl still about her — or the artist. Tonight her cape had some wine on it so she put a mackintosh over her ball gown and ate the toffees which she found in the pockets. I don’t know what her mother would say if she were alive.’ We drank quietly and watched the coloured lights flickering among the dancers. He said ‘I feel like an old procurer.
Always looking out for someone to marry her…. Her happiness seems so important, somehow … I am going the right way about to spoil it I know, by meddling … yet I can’t leave it alone …
I’ve scraped a dowry together over the years…. The money burns my pocket…. When I see a nice Englishman like you my instinct is to say: “For God’s sake take her and look after her.”
… It has been a bitter pleasure bringing her up without a mother.
Eh? No fool like an old fool.’ And he walks stiffly away to the bar, smiling.
Presently that evening Clea herself came and sat beside me in the alcove, fanning herself and smiling. ‘Quarter of an hour to midnight. Poor Cinderella. I must get my father home before the clock strikes or he’ll lose his beauty-sleep!’ We spoke then of Amar whose trial for the murder of de Brunel had ended that afternoon with his acquittal due to lack of direct evidence.
‘I know,’ said Clea softly. ‘And I’m glad. It has saved me from a crise de conscience. I would not have known what to do if he had been convicted. You see, I know he didn’t do it. Why? Because, my dear, I know who did and why….’ She narrowed those splendid eyes and went on. ‘A story of Alexandria — shall I tell you? But only if you keep it a secret. Would you promise me?