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:
* * * * *
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
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
‘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
* * * * *
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.
It was already forty minutes past the hour and he had already given the signal for dinner to begin when the little black telephone extension gave a small needle-like sound. He crossed to the table and picked it up with a sigh, and I heard him say, ‘yes’ impatiently; then he spoke for a while in a low voice, the language changing abruptly to Arabic, and for a moment I had the sudden intuitive feeling that it was Mnemjian talking to him over the wire. I do not know why I should feel this. He scribbled something rapidly on an envelope and putting down the receiver stood for a second memorizing what he had written. Then he turned to me, and it was all of a sudden a different Nessim who said: ‘Justine may need our help. Will you come with me?’ And without waiting for an answer he ran down the steps, past the lily-pond in the direction of the garage. I followed as well as I could and it could only have been a matter of minutes before he swung the little sports car through the heavy gates into Rue Fuad and began to weave his way down to the sea through the network of streets which slide down towards Ras El Tin. Though it was not late there were few people about and we raced away along the curving flanks of the Esplanade towards the Yacht Club grimly overtaking the few horse-drawn cabs (‘carriages of love’) which dawdled up and down by the sea.
At the fort we doubled back and entered the huddled slums which lie behind Tatwig Street, our blond headlights picking out the ant-hill cafes and crowded squares with an unaccustomed radiance; from somewhere behind the immediate skyline of smashed and unlimbered houses came the piercing shrieks and ululations of a burial procession, whose professional mourners made the night hideous with their plaints for the dead. We
