From the house came the dry snap of champagne-corks and the laughter of human beings. ‘Never an evening alone now.’
‘What is happening to Nessim?’
‘I no longer know. When there is something to hide one becomes an actor. It forces all the people round one to act as well.’ The same man, it was true, walked about on the surface of their common life — the same considerate, gentle punctual man: but in a horrifying sense everything had changed, he was no longer there. ‘We’ve abandoned each other’ she said in a small expiring whisper and drawing herself closer pressed to the very hilt of sense and sound the kisses which were like summaries of all we had shared, held precariously for a moment in our hands, before they should overflow into the surrounding darkness and forsake us.
And yet it was as if in every embrace she were saying to herself:
‘Perhaps through this very thing, which hurts so much and which I do not want ever to end — maybe through this I shall find my way back to Nessim.’ I was filled suddenly by an intolerable depression.
Later, walking about in the strident native quarter with its jabbing lights and flesh-wearing smells, I wondered as I had always wondered, where time was leading us. And as if to test the validity of the very emotions upon which so much love and anxiety could base themselves I turned into a lighted booth decorated by a strip of cinema poster — the huge half-face of a screen-lover, meaningless as the belly of a whale turned upwards in death — and sat down upon the customer’s stool, as one might in a barber’s shop, to wait my turn. A dirty curtain was drawn across the inner door and from behind it came faint sounds, as of the congress of creatures unknown to science, not specially revolting — indeed interesting as the natural sciences are for those who have abandoned any claims of cultivating a sensibility. I was of course drunk by this time and exhausted — drunk as much on Justine as upon the thinpaper-bodied Pol Roget.
There was a tarbush lying upon the chair beside me and absently I put it on my head. It was faintly warm and sticky inside and the thick leather lining clung to my forehead. ‘I want to know what it really means’ I told myself in a mirror whose cracks had been pasted over with the trimmings of postage stamps. I meant of course the whole portentous scrimmage of sex itself, the act of penetration which could lead a man to despair for the sake of a creature with two breasts and le croissant as the picturesque Levant slang has it. The sound within had increased to a sly groaning and squeaking — a combustible human voice adding itself to the jostling of an ancient wooden-slatted bed. This was presumably the identical undifferentiated act which Justine and I shared with the common world to which we belonged. How did it differ? How far had our feelings carried us from the truth of the simple, devoid beast-like act itself? To what extent was the treacherous mind — with its interminable catalogue raisonne of the heart — responsible?
I wished to answer an unanswerable question; but I was so desperate for certainty that it seemed to me that if I surprised the act in its natural state, motivated by scientific money and not love, as yet undamaged by the idea, I might surprise the truth of my own feelings and desires. Impatient to deliver myself from the question I lifted the curtain and stepped softly into the cubicle which was fitfully lighted by a buzzing staggering paraffin lamp turned down low.
The bed was inhabited by an indistinct mass of flesh moving in many places at once, vaguely stirring like an ant-heap. It took me some moments to define the pale and hairy limbs of an elderly man from those of his partner — the greenish-hued whiteness of convex woman with a boa constrictor’s head — a head crowned with spokes of toiling black hair which trailed over the edges of the filthy mattress. My sudden appearance must have suggested a police raid for it was followed by a gasp and complete silence. It was as if the ant-hill had suddenly become deserted. The man gave a groan and a startled half-glance in my direction and then as if to escape detection buried his head between the immense breasts of the woman. It was impossible to explain to them that I was investigating nothing more particular than the act upon which they were engaged. I advanced to the bed firmly, apologetically, and with what must have seemed a vaguely scientific air of detachment I took the rusty bedrail in my hands and stared down, not upon them for I was hardly conscious of their existence, but upon myself and Melissa, myself and Justine. The woman turned a pair of large gauche charcoal eyes upon me and said something in Arabic.
They lay there like the victims of some terrible accident, clumsily engaged, as if in some incoherent experimental fashion they were the first partners in the history of the human race to think out this peculiar means of communication. Their posture, so ludicrous and ill-planned, seemed the result of some early trial which might, after centuries of experiment, evolve into a disposition of bodies as breathlessly congruent as a ballet-position.
But nevertheless I recognized that this had been fixed immutably, for all time — this eternally tragic and ludicrous position of engagement. From this sprang all those aspects of love which the wit of poets and madmen had used to elaborate their philosophy of polite distinctions. From this point the sick, the insane started growing; and from here too the disgusted and dispirited faces of the long-married, tied to each other back to back, so to speak, like dogs unable to disengage after coupling.
The peal of soft cracked laughter I uttered surprised me, but it reassured my specimens. The man raised his face a few inches and listened attentively as if to assure himself that no policeman could have uttered such a laugh. The woman re-explained me to herself and smiled. ‘Wait one moment’ she cried, waving a white blotched hand in the direction of the curtain, ‘I will not be long.’ And the man, as if reprimanded by her tone, made a few convulsive movements, like a paralytic attempting to walk — impelled not by the demands of pleasure but by the purest courtesy. His expression betrayed an access of politeness — as of someone rising in a crowded tram to surrender his place to a mutile de la guerre. The woman grunted and her fingers curled up at the edges.
Leaving them there, fitted so clumsily together, I stepped laughing out into the street once more to make a circuit of the quarter which still hummed with the derisive, concrete life of men and women. The rain had stopped and the damp ground exhaled the tormentingly lovely scent of clay, bodies and stale jasmine. I began to walk slowly, deeply bemused, and to describe to myself in words this whole quarter of Alexandria for I knew that soon it would be forgotten and revisited only by those whose memories had been appropriated by the fevered city, clinging to the minds of old men like traces of perfume upon a sleeve: Alexandria, the capital of Memory.
The narrow street was of baked and scented terra cotta, soft now from rain but not wet. Its whole length was lined with the coloured booths of prostitutes whose thrilling marble bodies were posed modestly each before her doll’s house, as before a shrine. They sat on three-legged stools like oracles wearing coloured slippers, out in the open street. The originality of the lighting gave the whole scene the colours of deathless romance, for instead of being lit from above by electric light the whole street was lit by a series of stabbing carbide-lamps standing upon the ground: throwing thirsty, ravishing violet shadows upwards into the nooks and gables of the dolls’ houses, into the nostrils and eyes of its inhabitants, into the unresisting softness of that furry darkness. I walked slowly among these extraordinary human blooms, reflecting that a city like a human being collects its predispositions, appetites and fears. It grows to maturity, utters its prophets, and declines into hebetude, old age or the loneliness which is worse than either.