The Alexandria Quartet (6 page)

Little Mnemjian is a dwarf with a violet eye that has never lost its childhood. He is the Memory man, the archives of the city. If you should wish to know the ancestry or income of the most casual passer-by you have only to ask him; he will recite the details in a sing-song voice as he strops his razor and tries it upon the coarse black hair of his forearm. What he does not know he can find out in a matter of moments. Moreover he is as well briefed in the living as in the dead; I mean this in the literal sense, for the Greek Hospital employs him to shave and lay out its victims before they are committed to the undertakers — a task which he performs with relish tinged by racial unction. His ancient trade embraces the two worlds, and some of his best observations begin with the phrase: ‘As so-and-so said to me with
his last breath
.' He is rumoured to be fantastically attractive to women and he is said to have put away a small fortune earned for him by his admirers. But he also has several elderly Egyptian ladies, the wives and widows of pashas, as permanent clients upon whom he calls at regular intervals to set their hair. They have, as he says slyly, ‘got beyond everything' — and reaching up over his back to touch the unsightly hump which crowns it he adds with pride:
‘This
excites them.' Among other things, he has a gold cigarette case given to him by one of these admirers in which he keeps a stock of loose cigarette-paper. His Greek is defective but adventurous and vivid and Pombal refuses to permit him to talk French, which he does much better.

He does a little mild procuring for my friend, and I am always astonished by the sudden flights of poetry of which he is capable in describing his
protégées
. Leaning over Pombal's moon-like face he will say, for example, in a discreet undertone, as the razor begins to whisper: ‘I have something for you —
something special
.' Pombal catches my eye in the mirror and looks hastily away lest we infect one another by a smile. He gives a cautious grunt. Mnemjian leans lightly on the balls of his feet, his eyes squinting slightly. The small wheedling voice puts a husk of double meaning round everything he says, and his speech is not the less remarkable for being punctuated by small world-weary sighs. For a while nothing more is said. I can see the top of Mnemjian's head in the mirror — that obscene outcrop of black hair which he had trained into a spitcurl at each temple, hoping no doubt to draw attention away from that crooked
papier-mâché
back of his. While he works with a razor his eyes dim out and his features become as expressionless as a bottle. His fingers travel as coolly upon our live faces as they do upon those of the fastidious and (yes, lucky) dead. ‘This time' says Mnemjian “you will be delighted from every point of view. She is young, cheap and clean. You will say to yourself, a young partridge, a honey-comb with all its honey sealed in it, a dove. She is in difficulties over money. She has recently come from the lunatic asylum in Helwan where her husband tried to get her locked up as mad. I have arranged for her to sit at the Rose Marie at the end table on the pavement. Go and see her at one o'clock; if you wish her to accompany you give her the card I will prepare for you. But remember, you will pay only me. As one gentleman to another it is the only condition I lay down.'

He says nothing more for the time. Pombal continues to stare at himself in the mirror, his natural curiosity doing battle with the forlorn apathy of the summer air. Later no doubt he will bustle into the flat with some exhausted, disoriented creature whose distorted smile can rouse no feelings in him save those of pity. I cannot say that my friend lacks kindness, for he is always trying to find work of some sort for these girls; indeed most of the consulates are staffed by ex-casuals desperately trying to look correct; whose jobs they owe to Georges' importunities among his colleagues of the career. Nevertheless there is no woman too humble, too battered, too old, to receive those outward attentions — those little gallantries and
sorties
of wit which I have come to associate with the Gallic temperament; the heady meretricious French charm which evaporates so easily into pride and mental indolence — like French thought which flows so quickly into sand-moulds, the original
esprit
hardening immediately into deadening concepts. The light play of sex which hovers over his thought and actions has, however, an air of disinterestedness which makes it qualitatively different from, say, the actions and thoughts of Capodistria, who often joins us for a morning shave. Capodistria has the purely involuntary knack of turning everything into a woman; under his eyes chairs become painfully conscious of their bare legs. He impregnates things. At table I have seen a water-melon become conscious under his gaze so that it felt the seeds inside it stirring with life! Women feel like birds confronted by a viper when they gaze into that narrow flat face with its tongue always moving across the thin lips. I think of Melissa once more:
hortus conclusus, soror mea sponsor.…

‘Regard dérisoire
' says Justine. ‘How is it you are so much one of us and yet… you are not?' She is combing that dark head in the mirror, her mouth and eyes drawn up about a cigarette. ‘You are a mental refugee of course, being Irish, but you miss our
angoisse.'
What she is groping after is really the distinctive quality which emanates not from us but from the landscape — the metallic flavours of exhaustion which impregnate the airs of Mareotis.

As she speaks I am thinking of the founders of the city, of the soldier-God in his glass coffin, the youthful body lapped in silver, riding down the river towards his tomb. Or of that great square negro head reverberating with a concept of God conceived in the spirit of pure intellectual play — Plotinus. It is as if the preoccupations of this landscape were centred somewhere out of reach of the average inhabitant — in a region where the flesh, stripped by over-indulgence of its final reticences, must yield to a preoccupation vastly more comprehensive: or perish in the kind of exhaustion represented by the works of the Mouseion, the guileless playing of hermaphrodites in the green courtyards of art and science. Poetry as a clumsy attempt at the artificial insemination of the Muses; the burning stupid metaphor of Berenice's hair glittering in the night sky above Melissa's sleeping face. ‘Ah!' said Justine once ‘that there should be something free, something Polynesian about the licence in which we live.' Or even Mediterranean, she might have added, for the connotation of every kiss would be different in Italy or Spain; here our bodies were chafed by the harsh desiccated winds blowing up out of the deserts of Africa and for love we were forced to substitute a wiser but crueller mental tenderness which emphasized loneliness rather than expurgated it.

Now even the city had two centres of gravity — the true and magnetic north of its personality: and between them the temperament of its inhabitants sparked harshly like a leaky electric discharge. Its spiritual centre was the forgotten site of the Soma where once the confused young soldier's body lay in its borrowed Godhead; its temporal site the Brokers' Club where like Caballi* the cotton brokers sat to sip their coffee, puff rank cheroots and watch Capodistria — as people upon a river-bank will watch the progress of a fisherman or an artist. The one symbolized for me the great conquests of man in the realms of matter, space and time — which must inevitably yield their harsh knowledge of defeat to the conqueror in his coffin; the other was no symbol but the living limbo of free-will in which my beloved Justine wandered, searching with such frightening singleness of mind for the integrating spark which might lift her into a new perspective of herself. In her, as an Alexandrian, licence was in a curious way a form of self-abnegation, a travesty of freedom; and if I saw her as an exemplar of the city it was not of Alexandria, or Plotinus that I was forced to think, but of the sad thirtieth child of Valentinus who fell, ‘not like Lucifer by rebelling against God, but by desiring too ardently to be united to him'.* Anything pressed too far becomes a sin.

Broken from the divine harmony of herself she fell, says the tragic philosopher, and became the manifestation of matter; and the whole universe of her city, of the world, was formed out of her agony and remorse. The tragic seed from which her thoughts and actions grew was the seed of a pessimistic gnosticism.

That this identification was a true one I know — for much later when, with so many misgivings, she invited me to join the little circle which gathered every month about Balthazar, it was always what he had to say about gnosticism which most interested her. I remember her asking one night, so anxiously, so pleadingly if she had interpreted his thinking rightly: ‘I mean, that God neither created us nor wished us to be created, but that we are the work of an inferior deity, a Demiurge, who wrongly believed himself to be God? Heavens, how probable it seems; and this overweening
hubris
has been handed on down to our children.' And stopping me as we walked by the expedient of standing in front of me and catching hold of the lapels of my coat she gazed earnestly into my eyes and said: ‘What do you believe? You never say anything. At the most you sometimes laugh.' I did not know how to reply for all ideas seem equally good to me; the fact of their existence proves that someone is creating. Does it matter whether they are objectively right or wrong? They could never remain so for long. ‘But it matters' she cried with a touching emphasis. ‘It matters deeply my darling, deeply.'

We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behaviour and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it. I can think of no better identification. ‘Your doubt, for example, which contains so much anxiety and such a thirst for an absolute truth, is so different from the scepticism of the Greek, from the mental play of the Mediterranean mind with its deliberate resort to sophistry as part of the
game
of thought; for you thought is a weapon, a theology.'

‘But how else can action be judged?'

‘It cannot be judged comprehensively until thought itself can be judged, for our thoughts themselves are acts. It is an attempt to make partial judgements upon either that leads to misgivings.'

I liked so much the way she would suddenly sit down on a wall, or a broken pillar in that shattered backyard to Pompey's Pillar, and be plunged in an inextinguishable sorrow at some idea whose impact had only just made itself felt in her mind. ‘You really believe so?' she would say with such sorrow that one was touched and amused at the same time. ‘And why do you smile? You always smile at the most serious things. Ah! surely you should be sad?' If she ever knew me at all she must later have discovered that for those of us who feel deeply and who are at all conscious of the inextricable tangle of human thought there is only one response to be made — ironic tenderness and silence.

In a night so brilliant with stars where the glow-worms in the shrill dry grass gave back their ghostly mauve lambence to the sky there was nothing else to do but sit by her side, stroking that dark head of beautiful hair and saying nothing. Underneath, like a dark river, the noble quotation which Balthazar had taken as a text and which he read in a voice that trembled partly with emotion and partly with the fatigue of so much abstract thought: ‘The day of the
corpora
is the night for the
spiritus
. When the bodies cease their labour the spirits in man begin their work. The waking of the body is the sleep of the spirit and the spirit's sleep a waking for the body.' And later, like a thunderclap:
‘Evil is good perverted.'*

That Nessim had her watched I for a long time doubted; after all, she seemed as free as a bat to flit about the town at night, and never did I hear her called upon to give an account of her movements. It could not have been easy to spy upon someone so protean, in touch with the life of the town at so many points. Nevertheless it is possible that she was watched lest she should come to harm. One night an incident brought this home to me, for I had been asked to dine at the old house. When they were alone we dined in a little pavilion at the end of the garden where the summer coolness could mingle with the whisper of water from the four lions' heads bordering the fountain. Justine was late on this particular occasion and Nessim sat alone, with the curtains drawn back towards the west reflectively polishing a yellow jade from his collection in those long gentle fingers.