Justine (1957) Part I Chapter 8

 Two subjects upon which it was fruitless to question Justine too closely: her age, her origins. Nobody — possibly not even, I believe, Nessim himself — knew all about her with any certainty. Even the city’s oracle Mnemjian seemed for once at loss, though he was knowledgeable about her recent love affairs. Yet the violet eyes narrowed as he spoke of her and hesitantly he volunteered the information that she came from the dense Attarine Quarter, and had been born of a poor Jewish family which had since emigrated to Salonika. The diaries are not very helpful either since they lack clues — names, dates, places — and consist for the most part of wild flights of fancy punctuated by bitter little anecdotes and sharp line-drawings of people whose identity is masked by a letter of the alphabet. The French she writes in is not very correct, but spirited and highly-flavoured; and carries the matchless quality of that husky speaking-voice. Look: ‘Clea speaking of her childhood: thinking of mine, passionately thinking. The childhood of my race, my time…. Blows first in the hovel behind the Stadium; the clock-mender’s shop. I see myself now caught in the passionate concentration of watching a lover’s sleeping face as I so often saw him bent over a broken timepiece with the harsh light pouring down noiselessly over him. Blows and curses, and printed everywhere on the red mud walls (like the blows struck by conscience) the imprint of blue hands, fingers outstretched, that guarded us against the evil eye. With these blows we grew up, aching heads, flinching eyes. A house with an earthen floor alive with rats, dim with wicks floating upon oil. The old money-lender drunk and snoring, drawing in with every breath the compost-odours, soil, excrement, the droppings of bats; gutters choked with leaves and breadcrumbs softened by piss; yellow wreaths of jasmine, heady, meretricious. And then add screams in the night behind other shutters in that crooked street: the bey beating his wives because he was impotent. The old herb-woman selling herself every night on the flat ground among the razed houses — a sulky mysterious whining. The soft pelm noise of bare black feet passing on the baked mud street, late at night. Our room bulging with darkness and pestilence, and we Europeans in such disharmony with the fearful animal health of the blacks around us. The copulations of boabs shaking the house like a palm-tree. Black tigers with gleaming teeth. And everywhere the veils, the screaming, the mad giggle under the pepper-trees, the insanity and the lepers. Such things as children see and store up to fortify or disorient their lives. A camel has collapsed from exhaustion in the street outside the house. It is too heavy to transport to the slaughter-house so a couple of men come with axes and cut it up there and then in the open street, alive. They hack through the white flesh — the poor creature looking ever more pained, more aristocratic, more puzzled as its legs are hacked off. Finally there is the head still alive, the eyes open, looking round. Not a scream of protest, not a struggle. The animal submits like a palm-tree. But for days afterwards the mud street is soaked in its blood and our bare feet are printed by the moisture. ‘Money falling into the tin bowls of beggars. Fragments of every language — Armenian, Greek, Amharic, Moroccan Arabic; Jews from Asia Minor, Pontus, Georgia: mothers born in Greek settlements on the Black Sea; communities cut down like the branches of trees, lacking a parent body, dreaming of Eden. These are the poor quarters of the white city; they bear no resemblance to those lovely streets built and decorated by foreigners where the brokers sit and sip their morning papers. Even the harbour does not exist for us here. In the winter, sometimes, rarely, you can hear the thunder of a siren — but it is another country. Ah! the misery of harbours and the names they conjure when you are going nowhere. It is like a death — a death of the self uttered in every repetition of the word Alexandria, Alexandria.’

 ***** Rue Bab-el-Mandeb, Rue Abou-el-Dardar, Minet-el-Bassal (streets slippery with discarded fluff from the cotton marts) Nouzha (the rose-garden, some remembered kisses) or bus stops with haunted names like Saba Pacha, Mazloum; Zizinia Bacos, Schutz, Gianaclis. A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants. ***** One of the consequences of frequenting the great house was that I began to be noticed and to receive the attention of those who considered Nessim influential and presumed that if he spent his time with me I must also, in some undiscovered fashion, be either rich or distinguished. Pombal came to my room one afternoon while I was dozing and sat on my bed: ‘Look here’ he said, ‘you are beginning to be noticed. Of course a cicisbeo is a normal enough figure in Alexandrian life, but things are going to become socially very boring for you if you go out with those two so much. Look!’ And he handed me a large and florid piece of pasteboard with a printed invitation on it for cocktails at the French Consulate. I read it uncomprehendingly. Pombal said: ‘This is very silly. My chief, the Consul-General, is impassionated by Justine. All attempts to meet her have failed so far. His spies tell him that you have an entree into the family circle, indeed that you are … I know, I know. But he is hoping to displace you in her affections.’ He laughed heavily. Nothing sounded more preposterous to me at this time. ‘Tell the Consul-General’ I said … and uttered a forcible remark or two which caused Pombal to click his tongue reprovingly and shake his head. ‘I would love to’ he said ‘but, mon cher, there is a Pecking Order among diplomats as there is among poultry. I depend upon him for my little cross.’ Heaving his bulk round he next produced from his pocket a battered little yellow-covered novelette and placed it on my knees. ‘Here is something to interest you. Justine was married when she was very young to a French national, Albanian by descent, a writer. This little book is about her — a post-mortem on her; it is quite decently done.’ I turned the novel over in my hands. It was entitled Moeurs and it was by a certain Jacob Arnauti. The flyleaf showed it to have enjoyed numerous reprintings in the early thirties. ‘How do you know this?’ I asked, and Georges winked a large, heavy-lidded reptilian eye as he replied. ‘We have been making enquiries. The Consul can think of nothing but Justine, and the whole staff has been busy for weeks collecting information about her. Vive la France!’ When he had gone I started turning the pages of Moeurs, still half-dazed by sleep. It was very well written indeed, in the first person singular, and was a diary of Alexandrian life as seen by a foreigner in the early thirties. The author of the diary is engaged on research for a novel he proposes to do — and the day to day account of his life in Alexandria is accurate and penetrating; but what arrested me was the portrait of a young Jewess he meets and marries: takes to Europe: divorces. The foundering of this marriage on their return to Egypt is done with a savage insight that throws into relief the character of Claudia, his wife. And what astonished and interested me was to see in her a sketch of Justine I recognized without knowing: a younger, a more disoriented Justine, to be sure. But unmistakable. Indeed whenever I read the book, and this was often, I was in the habit of restoring her name to the text. It fitted with an appalling verisimilitude. They met, where I had first seen her, in the gaunt vestibule of the Cecil, in a mirror. ‘In the vestibule of this moribund hotel the palms splinter and refract their motionless fronds in the gilt-edged mirrors. Only the rich can afford to stay permanently — those who live on in the guilt-edged security of a pensionable old age. I am looking for cheaper lodgings. In the lobby tonight a small circle of Syrians, heavy in their dark suits, and yellow in their scarlet tarbushes, solemnly sit. Their hippopotamus-like womenfolk, lightly moustached, have jingled off to bed in their jewellery. The men’s curious soft oval faces and effeminate voices are busy upon jewel-boxes — for each of these brokers carries his choicest jewels with him in a casket; and after dinner the talk has turned to male jewellery. It is all the Mediterranean world has left to talk about; a self-interest, a narcissism which comes from sexual exhaustion expressing itself in the possessive symbol: so that meeting a man you are at once informed what he is worth, and meeting his wife you are told in the same breathless whisper what her dowry was. They croon like eunuchs over the jewels, turning them this way and that in the light to appraise them. They flash their sweet white teeth in little feminine smiles. They sigh. A white-robed waiter with a polished ebony face brings coffee. A silver hinge flies open upon heavy white (like the thighs of Egyptian women) cigarettes each with its few flecks of hashish. A few grains of drunkenness before bedtime. I have been thinking about the girl I met last night in the mirror: dark on marble-ivory white: glossy black hair: deep suspiring eyes in which one’s glances sink because they are nervous, curious, turned to sexual curiosity. She pretends to be a Greek, but she must be Jewish. It takes a Jew to smell out a Jew; and neither of us has the courage to confess our true race. I have told her I am French. Sooner or later we shall find one another out. ‘The women of the foreign communities here are more beautiful than elsewhere. Fear, insecurity dominates them. They have the illusion of foundering in the ocean of blackness all around. This city has been built like a dyke to hold back the flood of African darkness; but the soft-footed blacks have already started leaking into the European quarters: a sort of racial osmosis is going on. To be happy one would have to be a Moslem, an Egyptian woman — absorbent, soft, lax, overblown; given to veneers; their waxen skins turn citron-yellow or melon-green in the naphtha-flares. Hard bodies like boxes. Breasts apple-green and hard — a reptilian coldness of the outer flesh with its bony outposts of toes and fingers. Their feelings are buried in the pre-conscious. In love they give out nothing of themselves, having no self to give, but enclose themselves around you in an agonized reflection — an agony of unexpressed yearning that is at the opposite pole from tenderness, pleasure. For centuries now they have been shut in a stall with the oxen, masked, circumcised. Fed in darkness on jams and scented fats they have become tuns of pleasure, rolling on paper-white blue-veined legs. ‘Walking through the Egyptian quarter the smell of flesh changes — ammoniac, sandal-wood, saltpetre, spice, fish. She would not let me take her home — no doubt because she was ashamed of her house in these slums. Nevertheless she spoke wonderfully about her childhood. I have taken a few notes: returning home to find her father breaking walnuts with a little hammer on the table by the light of an oil-lamp. I can see him. He is no Greek but a Jew from Odessa in fur cap with greasy ringlets. Also the kiss of the Berberin, the enormous rigid penis like an obsidian of the ice age; leaning to take her underlip between beautiful unfiled teeth. We have left Europe behind here and are moving towards a new spiritual latitude. She gave herself to me with such contempt that I was for the first time in my life surprised at the quality of her anxiety; it was as if she were desperate, swollen with disaster. And yet these women belonging to these lost communities have a desperate bravery very different to ours. They have explored the flesh to a degree which makes them true foreigners to us. How am I to write about all this? Will she come, or has she disappeared forever? The Syrians are going to bed with little cries, like migrating birds.’ She comes. They talk. (‘Under the apparent provincial sophistication and mental hardness I thought I detected an inexperience, not of the world to be sure but of society. I was interesting, I realized, as a foreigner with good manners — and she turned upon me now the shy-wise regard of an owl from those enormous brown eyes whose faintly bluish eyeballs and long lashes threw into relief the splendour of the pupils, glittering and candid.’) It may be imagined with what breathless, painful anxiety I first read this account of a love-affair with Justine; and truly after many re-readings the book, which I now know almost by heart, has always remained for me a document, full of personal pain and astonishment. ‘Our love’ he writes in another place ‘was like a syllogism to which the true premises were missing: I mean regard. It was a sort of mental possession which trapped us both and set us to drift upon the shallow tepid waters of Mareotis like spawning frogs, a prey to instincts based in lassitude and heat…. No, that is not the way to put it. It is not very just. Let me try again with these infirm and unstable tools to sketch Claudia. Where shall we begin? ‘Well, her talent for situations had served her well for twenty years of an erratic and unpunctual life. Of her origins I learned little, save that she had been very poor. She gave me the impression of someone engaged in giving a series of savage caricatures of herself — but this is common to most lonely people who feel that their true self can find no correspondence in another. The speed with which she moved from one milieu to another, from one man, place, date to another, was staggering. But her instability had a magnificence that was truly arresting. The more I knew her the less predictable she seemed; the only constant was the frantic struggle to break through the barrier of her autism. And every action ended in error, guilt, repentance. How often I remember — “Darling, this time it will be different, I promise you.” ‘Later, when we went abroad: at the Adlon, the pollen of the spotlights playing upon the Spanish dancers fuming in the smoke of a thousand cigarettes; by the dark waters of Buda, her tears dropping hotly among the quietly flowing dead leaves; riding on the gaunt Spanish plains, the silence pock-marked by the sound of our horses’ hooves: by the Mediterranean lying on some forgotten reef. It was never her betrayals that upset me — for with Justine the question of male pride in possession became somehow secondary. I was bewitched by the illusion that I could really come to know her; but I see now that she was not really a woman but the incarnation of Woman admitting no ties in the society we inhabited. “I hunt everywhere for a life that is worth living. Perhaps if I could die or go mad it would provide a focus for all the feelings I have which find no proper outlet. The doctor I loved told me I was a nymphomaniac — but there is no gluttony or self-indulgence in my pleasure, Jacob. It is purely wasted from that point of view. The waste, my dear, the waste! You speak of taking pleasure sadly, like the puritans do. Even there you are unjust to me. I take it tragically, and if my medical friends want a compound word to describe the heartless creature I seem, why they will have to admit that what I lack of heart I make up in soul. That is where the trouble lies.” These are not, you see, the sort of distinctions of which women are usually capable. It was as if somehow her world lacked a dimension, and love had become turned inwards into a kind of idolatry. At first I mistook this for a devastating and self-consuming egotism, for she seemed so ignorant of the little prescribed loyalties which constitute the foundations of affection between men and women. This sounds pompous, but never mind. But now, remembering the panics and exaltations which she endured, I wonder whether I was right. I am thinking of those tiresome, dramas — scenes in furnished bedrooms, with Justine turning on the taps to drown the noise of her own crying. Walking up and down, hugging her arms in her armpits, muttering to herself, she seemed to smoulder like a tar-barrel on the point of explosion. My indifferent health and poor nerves — but above all my European sense of humour — seemed at such times to goad her beyond endurance. Suffering, let us say, from some imagined slight at a dinner-party she would patrol the strip of carpet at the foot of the bed like a panther. If I fell asleep she might become enraged and shake my by the shoulders, crying: “Get up, Jacob, I am suffering, can’t you see?” When I declined to take part in this charade she would perhaps break something upon the dressing-table in order to have an excuse to ring the bell. How many fearful faces of night-maids have I not seen confronted by this wild figure saying with a terrifying politeness: “Oblige me by clearing up the dressing-table. I have clumsily broken something.” Then she would sit smoking cigarette after cigarette. “I know exactly what this is” I told her once. “I expect that every time you are unfaithful to me and consumed by guilt you would like to provoke me to beat you up and give a sort of remission for your sins. My dear, I simply refuse to pander to your satisfactions. You must carry your own burdens. You are trying hard to get me to use a stockwhip on you. But I only pity you.” This, I must confess, made her very thoughtful for a moment and involuntarily her hands strayed to touch the smooth surface of the legs she had so carefully shaved that afternoon…. ‘Latterly, too, when I began to weary of her, I found this sort of abuse of the emotions so tiresome that I took to insulting her and laughing at her. One night I called her a tiresome hysterical Jewess. Bursting into those terrible hoarse sobs which I so often heard that even now in memory the thought of them (their richness, their melodious density) hurts me, she flung herself down on her own bed to lie, limbs loose and flaccid, played upon by the currents of her hysteria like jets from a hose. ‘Did this sort of thing happen so often or is it that my memory has multiplied it? Perhaps it was only once, and the echoes have misled me. At any rate I seem to hear so often the noise she made unstopping the bottle of sleeping tablets, and the small sound of the tablets falling into the glass. Even when I was dozing I would count, to see that she did not take too many. All this was much later, of course; in the early days I would ask her to come into my bed and self-conscious, sullen, cold, she would obey me. I was foolish enough to think that I could thaw her out and give her the physical peace upon which — I thought — mental peace must depend. I was wrong. There was some unresolved inner knot which she wished to untie and which was quite beyond my skill as a lover or a friend. Of course. Of course. I knew as much as could be known of the psychopathology of hysteria at that time. But there was some other quality which I thought I could detect behind all this. In a way she was not looking for life but for some integrating revelation which would give it point. ‘I have already described how we met — in the long mirror of the Cecil, before the open door of the ballroom, on a night of carnival. The first words we spoke were spoken, symbolically enough, in the mirror. She was there with a man who resembled a cuttle-fish and who waited while she examined her dark face attentively. I stopped to adjust an unfamiliar bow-tie. She had a hungry natural candour which seemed proof against any suggestion of forwardness as she smiled and said: “There is never enough light.” To which I responded without thought: “For women perhaps. We men are less exigent.” We smiled and I passed her on my way to the ballroom, ready to walk out of her mirror-life forever, without a thought. Later the hazards of one of those awful English dances, called the Paul Jones I believe, left me facing her for a waltz. We spoke a few disjointed words — I dance badly; and here I must confess that her beauty made no impression on me. It was only later when she began her trick of drawing hasty ill-defined designs round my character, throwing my critical faculties into disorder by her sharp penetrating stabs; ascribing to me qualities which she invented on the spur of the moment out of that remorseless desire to capture my attention. Women must attack writers — and from the moment she learned I was a writer she felt disposed to make herself interesting by dissecting me. All this would have been most flattering to my amour-propre had some of her observations been further from the mark. But she was acute, and I was too feeble to resist this sort of game — the mental ambuscades which constitute the opening gambits of a flirtation. ‘From here I remember nothing more until that night — that marvellous summer night on the moon-drenched balcony above the sea with Justine pressing a warm hand on my mouth to stop me talking and saying something like: “Quick. Engorge-moi. From desire to revulsion — let’s get it over.” She had, it seemed, already exhausted me in her own imagination. But the words were spoken with such weariness and humility — who could forbear to love her? ‘It is idle to go over all this in a medium as unstable as words. I remember the edges and corners of so many meetings, and I see a sort of composite Justine, concealing a ravenous hunger for information, for power through self-knowledge, under a pretence of feeling. Sadly I am driven to wonder whether I ever really moved her — or existed simply as a laboratory in which she could work. She learned much from me: to read and reflect. She had achieved neither before. I even persuaded her to keep a diary in order to clarify her far from commonplace thoughts. But perhaps what I took to be love was merely a gratitude. Among the thousand discarded people, impressions, subjects of study — somewhere I see myself drifting, floating, reaching out arms. Strangely enough it was never in the lover that I really met her but in the writer. Here we clasped hands — in that amoral world of suspended judgements where curiosity and wonder seem greater than order — the syllogistic order imposed by the mind. This is where one waits in silence, holding one’s breath, lest the pane should cloud over. I watched over her like this. I was mad about her. ‘She had of course many secrets being a true child of the Mouseion, and I had to guard myself desperately against jealousy or the desire to intrude upon the hidden side of her life. I was almost successful in this and if I spied upon her it was really from curiosity to know what she might be doing or thinking when she was not with me. There was, for example, a woman of the town whom she visited frequently, and whose influence on her was profound enough to make me suspect an illicit relationship; there was also a man to whom she wrote long letters, though as far as I could see he lived in the city. Perhaps he was bedridden? I made inquiries, but my spies always brought me back uninteresting information. The woman was a fortune-teller, elderly, a widow. The man to whom she wrote — her pen shrilling across the cheap notepaper — turned out to be a doctor who held a small part-time post on a local consulate. He was not bedridden; but he was a homosexual, and dabbled in hermetic philosophy which is now so much in vogue. Once she left a particularly clear impression on my blotting-pad and in the mirror (the mirror again!) I was able to read:—”my life there is a sort of Unhealed Place as you call it which I try to keep full of people, accidents, diseases, anything that comes to hand. You are right when you say it is an apology for better living, wiser living. But while I respect your disciplines and your knowledge I feel that if I am ever going to come to terms with myself I must work through the dross in my own character and burn it up. Anyone could solve my problem artificially by placing it in the lap of a priest. We Alexandrians have mere pride than that — and more respect for religion. It would not be fair to God, my dear sir, and whoever else I fail (I see you smile) I am determined not to fail Him whoever He is.” ‘It seemed to me then that if this was part of a love-letter it was the kind of love-letter one could only address to a saint; and again I was struck, despite the clumsiness and incorrectness of the writing, by the fluency with which she could dissociate between ideas of different categories. I began to see her in an altered light; as somebody who might well destroy herself in an excess of wrongheaded courage and forfeit the happiness which she, in common with all the rest of us, desired and lived only to achieve. These thoughts had the effect of qualifying my love for her, and I found myself filled sometimes by disgust for her. But what made me afraid was that after quite a short time I found to my horror that I could not live without her. I tried. I took short journeys away from her. But without her I found life full of consuming boredom which was quite insupportable. I had fallen in love. The very thought filled me with an inexplicable despair and disgust. It was as if I unconsciously realized that in her I had met my evil genius. To come to Alexandria heart-whole and to discover an amor fati — it was a stroke of ill-luck which neither my health nor my nerves felt capable of supporting. Looking in the mirror I reminded myself that I had turned forty and already there was a white hair or two at my temples! I thought once of trying to end this attachment, but in every smile and kiss of Justine I felt my resolutions founder. Yet with her one felt all around the companionship of shadows which invaded life and filled it with a new resonance. Feeling so rich in ambiguities could not be resolved by a sudden act of the will. I had at times the impression of a woman whose every kiss was a blow struck on the side of death. When I discovered, for example (what I knew) that she had been repeatedly unfaithful to me, and at times when I had felt myself to be closest to her, I felt nothing very sharp in outline; rather a sinking numbness such as one might feel on leaving a friend in hospital, to enter a lift and fall six floors in silence, standing beside a uniformed automaton whose breathing one could hear. The silence of my room deafened me. And then, thinking about it, gathering my whole mind about the fact I realized that what she had done bore no relation to myself: it was an attempt to free herself for me: to give me what she knew belonged to me. I cannot say that this sounded any better to my ears than a sophistry. Nevertheless my heart seemed to know the truth of this and dictated a tactful silence to me to which she responded with a new warmth, a new ardour, of gratitude added to love. This again disgusted me somewhat. ‘Ah! but if you had seen her then as I did in her humbler, gentler moments, remembering that she was only a child, you would not have reproached me for cowardice. In the early morning, sleeping in my arms, her hair blown across that smiling mouth, she looked like no other woman I could remember: indeed like no woman at all, but some marvellous creature caught in the Pleistocene stage of her development. And later again, thinking about her as I did and have done these past few years I was surprised to find that though I loved her wholly and knew that I should never love anyone else — yet I shrank from the thought that she might return. The two ideas co-existed in my mind without displacing one another. I thought to myself with relief “Good. I have really loved at last. That is something achieved”; and to this my alter ego added: “Spare me the pangs of love requited with Justine.” This enigmatic polarity of feeling was something I found completely unexpected. If this was love then it was a variety of the plant which I have never seen before. (“Damn the word” said Justine once. “I would like to spell it backwards as you say the Elizabethans did God. Call it evol and make it a part of ‘evolution’ or ‘revolt’. Never use the word to me.”)’