Justine (1957) Part I Chapter 4

Streets that run back from the docks with their tattered rotten supercargo of houses, breathing into each others’ mouths, keeling over. Shuttered balconies swarming with rats, and old women whose hair is full of the blood of ticks. Peeling walls leaning drunkenly to east and west of their true centre of gravity. The black ribbon of flies attaching itself to the lips and eyes of the children — the moist beads of summer flies everywhere; the very weight of their bodies snapping off ancient flypapers hanging in the violet doors of booths and cafés. The smell of the sweat-lathered Berberinis, like that of some decomposing stair-carpet. And then the street noises: shriek and clang of the water-bearing Saidi, dashing his metal cups together as an advertisement, the unheeded shrieks which pierce the hubbub from time to time, as of some small delicately-organized animal being disembowelled. The sores like ponds — the incubation of a human misery of such proportions that one is aghast, and all one’s feelings overflow into disgust and terror. I wished I could imitate the self-confident directness with which Justine threaded her way through these streets towards the café where I waited for her: El Bab. The doorway by the shattered arch where in all innocence we sat and talked; but already our conversation had become impregnated by understandings which we took for the lucky omens of friendship merely. On that dun mud floor, feeling the quickly cooling cylinder of the earth dip towards the darkness, we were possessed only by a desire to communicate ideas and experiences which overstepped the range of thought normal to conversation among ordinary people. She talked like a man and I talked to her like a man. I can only remember the pattern and weight of these conversations, not their substance. And leaning there on a forgotten elbow, drinking the cheap arak and smiling at her, I inhaled the warm summer perfume of her dress and skin — a perfume which was called, I don’t know why, Jamais de la vie.

 ***** These are the moments which possess the writer, not the lover, and which live on perpetually. One can return to them time and time again in memory, or use them as a fund upon which to build the part of one’s life which is writing. One can debauch them with words, but one cannot spoil them. In this context too, I recover another such moment, lying beside a sleeping woman in a cheap room near the mosque. In that early spring dawn, with its dense dew, sketched upon the silence which engulfs a whole city before the birds awaken it, I caught the sweet voice of the blind muezzin from the mosque reciting the Ebed — a voice hanging like a hair in the palm-cooled upper airs of Alexandria. ‘I praise the perfection of God, the Forever existing’ (this repeated thrice, ever more slowly, in a high sweet register). ‘The perfection of God, the Desired, the Existing, the Single, the Supreme: the perfection of God, the One, the Sole: the perfection of Him who taketh unto himself no male or female partner, nor any like Him, nor any that is disobedient, nor any deputy, equal or offspring. His perfection be extolled.’ The great prayer wound its way into my sleepy consciousness like a serpent, coil after shining coil of words — the voice of the muezzin sinking from register to register of gravity — until the whole morning seemed dense with its marvellous healing powers, the intimations of a grace undeserved and unexpected, impregnating that shabby room where Melissa lay, breathing as lightly as a gull, rocked upon the oceanic splendours of a language she would never know.

***** Of Justine who can pretend that she did not have her stupid side? The cult of pleasure, small vanities, concern for the good opinion of her inferiors, arrogance. She could be tiresomely exigent when she chose. Yes. Yes. But all these weeds are watered by money. I will say only that in many things she thought as a man, while in her actions she enjoyed some of the free vertical independence of the masculine outlook. Our intimacy was of a strange mental order. Quite early on I discovered that she could mind-read in an unerring fashion. Ideas came to us simultaneously. I remember once being made aware that she was sharing in her mind a thought which had just presented itself to mine, namely: ‘This intimacy should go no further, for we have already exhausted all its possibilities in our respective imaginations: and what we shall end by discovering, behind the darkly woven colours of sensuality, will be a friendship so profound that we shall become bondsmen forever.’ It was, if you like, the flirtation of minds prematurely exhausted by experience which seemed so much more dangerous than a love founded in sexual attraction. Knowing how much she loved Nessim and loving him so much myself, I could not contemplate this thought without terror. She lay beside me, breathing lightly, and staring at the cherub-haunted ceiling with her great eyes. I said: ‘It can come to nothing, this love-affair between a poor schoolteacher and an Alexandrian society woman. How bitter it would be to have it all end in a conventional scandal which would leave us alone together and give you the task of deciding how to dispose of me.’ Justine hated to hear the truth spoken. She turned upon one elbow and lowering those magnificent troubled eyes to mine she stared at me for a long moment. ‘There is no choice in this matter’ she said in that hoarse voice I had come to love so much. ‘You talk as if there was a choice. We are not strong or evil enough to exercise choice. All this is part of an experiment arranged by something else, the city perhaps, or another part of ourselves. How do I know?’ I remember her sitting before the multiple mirrors at the dressmaker’s, being fitted for a shark-skin costume, and saying: ‘Look! five different pictures of the same subject. Now if I wrote I would try for a multi-dimensional effect in character, a sort of prism-sightedness. Why should not people show more than one profile at a time?’ Now she yawned and lit a cigarette; and sitting up in bed clasped her slim ankles with her hands; reciting slowly, wryly, those marvellous lines of the old Greek poet about a love-affair long since past — they are lost in English. And hearing her speak his lines, touching every syllable of the thoughtful ironic Greek with tenderness, I felt once more the strange equivocal power of the city — its flat alluvial landscape and exhausted airs — and knew her for a true child of Alexandria; which is neither Greek, Syrian nor Egyptian, but a hybrid: a joint. And with what feeling she reached the passage where the old man throws aside the ancient love-letter which had so moved him and exclaims: ‘I go sadly out on to the balcony; anything to change this train of thought, even if only to see some little movement in the city I love, in its streets and shops!’ Herself pushing open the shutters to stand on the dark balcony above a city of coloured lights: feeling the evening wind stir from the confines of Asia: her body for an instant forgotten.

***** ‘Prince’ Nessim is of course a joke; at any rate to the shopkeepers and black-coated commer.ants who saw him drawn soundlessly down the Canopic way in the great silver Rolls with the daffodil hub-caps. To begin with he was a Copt, not a Moslem. Yet somehow the nickname was truly chosen for Nessim was princely in his detachment from the common greed in which the decent instincts of the Alexandrians — even the very rich ones — foundered. Yet the factors which gave him a reputation for eccentricity were neither of them remarkable to those who had lived outside the Levant. He did not care for money, except to spend it — that was the first: the second was that he did not own a gar.onnière, and appeared to be quite faithful to Justine — an unheard of state of affairs. As for money, being so inordinately rich he was possessed by a positive distaste for it, and would never carry it on his person. He spent in Arabian fashion and gave notes of hand to shopkeepers; night-clubs and restaurants accepted his signed cheques. Nevertheless his debts were punctually honoured, and every morning Selim his secretary was sent out with the car to trace the route of the previous day and to pay any debts accumulated in the course of it. This attitude was considered eccentric and high-handed in the extreme by the inhabitants of the city whose coarse and derived distinctions, menial preoccupations and faulty education gave them no clue to what style in the European sense was. But Nessim was born to this manner, not merely educated to it; in this little world of studied carnal moneymaking he could find no true province of operation for a spirit essentially gentle and contemplative. The least assertive of men, he caused comment by acts which bore the true stamp of his own personality. People were inclined to attribute his manners to a foreign education, but in fact Germany and England had done little but confuse him and unfit him for the life of the city. The one had implanted a taste for metaphysical speculation in what was a natural Mediterranean mind, while Oxford had tried to make him donnish and had only succeeded in developing his philosophic bent to the point where he was incapable of practising the art he most loved, painting. He thought and suffered a good deal but he lacked the resolution to dare — the first requisite of a practitioner. Nessim was at odds with the city, but since his enormous fortune brought him daily into touch with the business men of the place they eased their constraint by treating him with a humorous indulgence, a condescension such as one would bestow upon someone who was a little soft in the head. It was perhaps not surprising if you should walk in upon him at the office — that sarcophagus of tubular steel and lighted glass — and find him seated like an orphan at the great desk (covered in bells and pulleys and patent lights) — eating brown bread and butter and reading Vasari as he absently signed letters or vouchers. He looked up at you with that pale almond face, the expression shuttered, withdrawn, almost pleading. And yet somewhere through all this gentleness ran a steel cord, for his staff was perpetually surprised to find out that, inattentive as he appeared to be, there was no detail of the business which he did not know; while hardly a transaction he made did not turn out to be based on a stroke of judgement. He was something of an oracle to his own employees — and yet (they sighed and shrugged their shoulders) he seemed not to care! Not to care about gain, that is what Alexandria recognizes as madness. I knew them by sight for many months before we actually met — as I knew everyone in the city. By sight and no less by repute: for their emphatic, authoritative and quite conventionless way of living had given them a certain notoriety among our provincial city-dwellers. She was reputed to have had many lovers, and Nessim was regarded as a mari complaisant. I had watched them dancing together several times, he slender and with a deep waist like a woman, and long arched beautiful hands; Justine’s lovely head — the deep bevel of that Arabian nose and those translucent eyes, enlarged by belladonna. She gazed about her like a half-trained panther. Then: once I had been persuaded to lecture upon the native poet of the city at the Atelier des Beaux Arts — a sort of club where gifted amateurs of the arts could meet, rent studios and so on. I had accepted because it meant a little money for Melissa’s new coat, and autumn was on the way. But it was painful to me, feeling the old man all round me, so to speak, impregnating the gloomy streets around the lecture-room with the odour of those verses distilled from the shabby but rewarding loves he had experienced — loves perhaps bought with money, and lasting a few moments, yet living on now in his verse — so deliberately and tenderly had he captured the adventive minute and made all its colours fast. What an impertinence to lecture upon an ironist who so naturally, and with such fineness of instinct took his subject-matter from the streets and brothels of Alexandria! And to be talking, moreover, not to an audience of haberdashers’ assistants and small clerks — his immortals — but to a dignified semi-circle of society ladies for whom the culture he represented was a sort of blood-bank: they had come along for a transfusion. Many had actually foregone a bridge-party to do so, though they knew that instead of being uplifted they would be stupefied. I remember saying only that I was haunted by his face — the horrifyingly sad gentle face of the last photograph; and when the solid burghers’ wives had dribbled down the stone staircase into the wet streets where their lighted cars awaited them, leaving the gaunt room echoing with their perfumes, I noticed that they had left behind them one solitary student of the passions and the arts. She sat in a thoughtful way at the back of the hall, her legs crossed in a mannish attitude, puffing a cigarette. She did not look at me but crudely at the ground under her feet. I was flattered to think that perhaps one person had appreciated my difficulties. I gathered up my damp brief case and ancient mackintosh and made my way down to where a thin penetrating drizzle swept the streets from the direction of the sea. I made for my lodgings where by now Melissa would be awake, and would have set out our evening meal on the newspaper-covered table, having first sent Hamid out to the baker’s to fetch the roast — we had no oven of our own. It was cold in the street and I crossed to the lighted blaze of shops in Rue Fuad. In a grocer’s window I saw a small tin of olives with the name Orvieto on it, and overcome by a sudden longing to be on the right side of the Mediterranean, entered the shop: bought it: had it opened there and then: and sitting down at a marble table in that gruesome light I began to eat Italy, its dark scorched flesh, hand-modelled spring soil, dedicated vines. I felt that Melissa would never understand this. I should have to pretend I had lost the money. I did not see at first the great car which she had abandoned in the street with its engine running. She came into the shop with swift and resolute suddenness and said, with the air of authority that Lesbians, or women with money, assume with the obviously indigent: ‘What did you mean by your remark about the antinomian nature of irony?’ — or some such sally which I have forgotten. Unable to disentangle myself from Italy I looked up boorishly and saw her leaning down at me from the mirrors on three sides of the room, her dark thrilling face full of a troubled, arrogant reserve. I had of course forgotten what I had said about irony or anything else for that matter, and I told her so with an indifference that was not assumed. She heaved a short sigh, as if of natural relief, and sitting down opposite me lit a French caporal and with short decisive inspirations blew thin streamers of blue smoke up into the harsh light. She looked to me a trifle unbalanced, as she watched me with a candour I found embarrassing — it was as if she were trying to decide to what use I could be put. ‘I liked’ she said ‘the way you quoted his lines about the city. Your Greek is good. Doubtless you are a writer.’ I said: ‘Doubtless.’ Not to be known always wounds. There seemed no point in pursuing all this. I have always hated literary conversation. I offered her an olive which she ate swiftly, spitting the pit into her gloved hand like a cat where she held it absently, saying: ‘I want to take you to Nessim, my husband. Will you come?’ A policeman had appeared in the doorway, obviously troubled about the abandoned car. That was the first time I saw the great house of Nessim with its statues and palm loggias, its Courbets and Bonnards — and so on. It was both beautiful and horrible. Justine hurried up the great staircase, pausing only to transfer her olive-pit from the pocket of her coat to a Chinese vase, calling all the time to Nessim. We went from room to room, fracturing the silences. He answered at last from the great studio on the roof and racing to him like a gun-dog she metaphorically dropped me at his feet and stood back, wagging her tail. She had achieved me. Nessim was sitting on the top of a ladder reading, and he came slowly down to us, looking first at one and then at the other. His shyness could not get any purchase of my shabbiness, damp hair, tin of olives, and for my part I could offer no explanation of my presence, since I did not know for what purpose I had been brought here. I took pity on him and offered him an olive; and sitting down together we finished the tin, while Justine foraged for drinks, talking, if I remember, of Orvieto where neither of us had been. It is such a solace to think back to that first meeting. Never have I been closer to them both — closer, I mean, to their marriage; they seemed to me then to be the magnificent two-headed animal a marriage could be. Watching the benign warmth of the light in his eye I realized, as I recalled all the scandalous rumours about Justine, that whatever she had done had been done in a sense for him — even what was evil or harmful in the eyes of the world. Her love was like a skin in which he lay sewn like the infant Heracles; and her efforts to achieve herself had led her always towards, and not away from him. The world has no use for this sort of paradox I know; but it seemed to me then that Nessim knew and accepted her in a way impossible to explain to someone for whom love is still entangled with the qualities of possessiveness. Once, much later, he told me: ‘What was I to do? Justine was too strong for me in too many ways. I could only out-love her — that was my long suit. I went ahead of her — I anticipated every lapse; she found me already there, at every point where she fell down, ready to help her to her feet and show that it did not matter. After all she compromised the least part of me — my reputation.’ This was much later: before the unlucky complex of misfortunes had engulfed us we did not know each other well enough to talk as freely as this. I also remember him saying, once — this was at the summer villa near Bourg El Arab: ‘It will puzzle you when I tell you that I thought Justine great, in a sort of way. There are forms of greatness, you know, which when not applied in art or religion make havoc of ordinary life. Her gift was misapplied in being directed towards love. Certainly she was bad in many ways, but they were all small ways. Nor can I say that she harmed nobody. But those she harmed most she made fruitful. She expelled people from their old selves. It was bound to hurt, and many mistook the nature of the pain she inflicted. Not I.’ And smiling his well-known smile, in which sweetness was mixed with an inexpressible bitterness, he repeated softly under his breath the words: ‘Not I.’