chapter X

Dearest Clea: Three long months and no word from you. I would have been very much disquieted had not the faithful Balthazar sent me his punctual postcard every few days to report so favourably on your progress: though of course he gives me no details. You for your part must have grown increasingly angry at my callous silence which you so little deserve. Truthfully, I am bitterly ashamed of it. I do not know what curious inhibition has been holding me back. I have been unable either to analyse it or to react against it effectively. It has been like a handle of a door which won’t turn. Why? It is doubly strange because I have been deeply conscious of you all the time, of you being actively present in my thoughts. I’ve been holding you, metaphorically, cool against my throbbing mind like a knife-blade. Is it possible that I enjoyed you better as a thought than as a person alive, acting in the world? Or was it that words themselves seemed so empty a consolation for the distance which has divided us? I do not know. But now that the job is nearly completed I seem suddenly to have found my tongue. Things alter their focus on this little island. You called it a metaphor once, I remember, but it is very much a reality to me — though of course vastly changed from the little haven I knew before. It is our own invasion which has changed it. You could hardly imagine that ten technicians could make such a change. But we have imported money, and with it are slowly altering the economy of the place, displacing labour at inflated prices, creating all sorts of new needs of which the lucky inhabitants were not conscious before. Needs which in the last analysis will destroy the tightly woven fabric of this feudal village with its tense blood-relationships, its feuds and archaic festivals. Its wholeness will dissolve under these alien pressures. It was so tightly woven, so beautiful and symmetrical like a swallow’s nest. We are picking it apart like idle boys, unaware of the damage we inflict. It seems inescapable the death we bring to the old order without wishing it. It is simply done too — a few steel girders, some digging equipment, a crane! Suddenly things begin to alter shape. A new cupidity is born. It will start quietly with a few barbers’ shops, but will end by altering the whole architecture of the port. In ten years it will be an unrecognizable jumble of warehouses, dance-halls and brothels for merchant sailors. Only give us enough time! The site which they chose for the relay station is on the mountainous eastward side of the island, and not where I lived before. I am rather glad of this in an obscure sort of way. I am sentimental enough about old memories to enjoy them — but how much better they seem in the light of a small shift of gravity; they are renewed and refreshed all at once. Moreover this corner of the island is unlike any other part — a high wine-bearing valley overlooking the sea. Its soils are gold, bronze and scarlet — I suppose they consist of some volcanic marl. The red wine they make is light and very faintly pétillant, as if a volcano still slum bered in every bottle. Yes, here the mountains ground their teeth together (one can hear them during the frequent tremors!) and powdered up these metamorphic rocks into chalk. I live in a small square house of two rooms built over a wine -magazine. A terraced and tiled courtyard separates it from several other such places of storage — deep cellars full of sleeping wine in tuns. We are in the heart of the vineyards; on all sides, ruled away on the oblong to follow the spine of the blue hill above the sea, run the shallow canals of humus and mould between the sym metrical vines which are now flourishing. Galleries — no, bowling -alleys of the brown ashy earth, every mouthful finger and -fist -sifted by the industrious girls. Here and there figs and olives intrude upon this rippling forest of green, this vine -carpet. It is so dense that once you are in it, crouched, your field of visibility is about three feet, like a mouse in the corn. As I write there are a dozen invisible girls tunnelling like moles, turning the soil. I hear their voices but see nothing. Yes, they are crawling about in there like sharpshooters. They rise and start work before dawn. I wake and hear them arriving often, sometimes singing a snatch of a Greek folk -song! I am up at five. The first birds come over and are greeted by the small reception committee of optimistic hunters who pot idly at them and then pass up the hill, c h a t t e r i n g a n d c h a f f i n g e a c h o t h e r . S h a d i n g m y t e r r a c e s t a n d s a t a l l t r e e o f w h i t e m u l b e r r i e s , w i t h t h e l a r g e s t f r u i t I ha v e e v e r s e e n — a s b i g as c a t e r p i l l a r s . T h e fruit is ripe and the wasps have found it and are quite drunk on the sweetness. They behave just like human beings, laughing uproariously about nothing, falling down, picking fights…. The life is hard, but good. What pleasure to actually sweat over a task, actually use one’s hands! And while we are harvesting steel to raise, membrane by membrane, this delicate mysterious ex -voto to the sky — why the vines are ripening too with their reminder that long after man has stopped his neurotic fiddling with the death -bringing tools with which he expresses his fear of life, the old dark gods are there, underground, buried in the moist humus of the chthonian world (that favourite world of P). They are forever sited in the human wish. They will never capitulate! (I am talking at random simply to give you an idea of the sort of life I lead here.) The early hill -barley is being gathered. You meet walking haystacks — haystacks with nothing but a pair of feet below them trudging along these rocky lanes. The weird shouts the women give, either at cattle or calling to one another from hillside to hillside. ‘Wow’‘hoosh’‘gnaiow’. This barley is laid upon the flat roofs for threshing out the chaff which they do with sticks. Barley! hardly is the word spoken before the ant processions begin, long chains of dark ants trying to carry it away to their private storehouses. This in turn has alerted the yellow lizards; they prowl about eating the ants, lying in ambush winking their eyes. And, as if following out the octave of causality in nature, here come the cats to hunt and eat the lizards. This is not good for them, and many die of a wasting disease attributed to this folly. But I suppose the thrill of the chase is on them. And then? Well, now and then a viper kills a cat stone dead. And the man with his spade breaks the snake’s back. And the man? Autumn fevers come on with the first rain. The old men tumble into the grave like fruit off a tree. Finita la guerra! These people were occupied by Italians and quite a few learned the language which they speak with a Sienese accent. In the little square is a fountain where the women gather. They proudly display their babies, and fancy them as if they were up for sale. This one is fat, that one thin. The young men pass up and down the road with hot shy glances. One of them sings archly ‘Solo, per te, Lucia’. But they only toss their heads and continue with their gossip. There is an old and apparently completely deaf man filling his pitcher. He is almost electrocuted by the phrase ‘Dmitri at the big house is dead.’ It lifts him off the ground. He spins round in a towering rage. ‘Dead? Who’s dead? Eh? What?’ His hearing is much improved all at once. There is a little acropolis now called Fontana, high up there in the clouds. Yet it isn’t far. But a steep climb up clinker -dry river -beds amid clouds of black flies; you come upon herds of rushing black goats like satans. There is a tiny hospice on the top with one mad monk; built as if on a turntable like a kiln of rusk. From here you can drink the sweet indolent misty curves of the island to the west. And the future? Well, this is a sketch of a nearly ideal present which will not last forever; indeed has almost expired, for within another month or so my usefulness will come to an end, and with it presumably the post upon which I depend for my exiguous livelihood. I have no resources of my own and must consider ways and means. No, the future rolls about inside me with every roll of the ship, so to speak, like a cargo which has worked loose. Were it not to see you again I doubt if I could return again to Alexandria. I feel it fade inside me, in my thoughts, like some valedictory mirage — like the sad history of some great queen whose fortunes have foundered among the ruins of armies and the sands of time! My mind has been turning more and more westward, towards the old inheritance of Italy or France. Surely there is still some worthwhile work to be done among their ruins — something which we can cherish, perhaps even revive? I ask myself this question, but it really addresses itself to you. Uncommitted as yet to any path, never theless the one I would most like to take leads westward and northward. There are other reasons. The terms of my contract entitle me to free ‘repatriation’ as they call it; to reach England would cost me nothing. Then, with the handsome service gratuity which all this bondage has earned me, I think I could afford a spell in Europe. My heart leaps at the thought. But something in all this must be decided for me; I have a feeling, I mean, that it is not I who shall decide. Please forgive me my silence for which I cannot offer any excuse and write me a line. Last Saturday I found myself with a free day and a half, so I walked across the island with a pack to spend a night in the little house where I lived on my previous visit. What a contrast to this verdant highland it was to strike that wild and windy promontory once more, the acid green seas and fretted coastlines of the past. It was indeed another island — I suppose the past always is. Here for a night and a day I lived the life of an echo, thinking much about the past and about us all moving in it, the ‘selective fictions’ which life shuffles out like a pack of cards, mixing and dividing, withdrawing and restoring. It did not seem to me that I had the right to feel so calm and happy: a sense of Plenitude in which the only unanswered question was the one which arose with each memory of your name. Yes, a different island, harsher and more beautiful of aspect. One held the night -silence in one’s hands; feeling it slowly melting — as a child holds a piece of ice! At noon a dolphin rising from the ocean. Earthquake vapours on the sea -line. The great grove of plane trees with their black elephant hides which the wind strips off in great scrolls revealing the soft grey ashen skin within…. Much of the detail I had forgotten. It is rather off the beaten track this little promontory; only olive -pickers might come here in season. Otherwise the only visitants are the charcoal burners who ride through the grove before light every day with a characteristic jingle of stirrups. They have built long narrow trenches on the hill. They crouch over them all day, black as demons. But for the most part one might be living on the moon. Slightly noise of sea, the patient stridulation of cigales in the sunlight. One day I caught a tortoise at my front door; on the beach was a smashed turtle’s egg. Small items which plant them selves in the speculative mind like single notes of music belonging to some larger composition which I suppose one will never hear. The tortoise makes a charming and undemanding pet. I can hear P say: ‘Brother Ass and his tortoise. The marriage of true minds!’ For the rest: the picture of a man skimming flat stones upon the still water of the lagoon at evening, waiting for a letter out of silence.

But I had hardly confided this letter to the muleteer postman who took our mail down to the town before I received a letter with an Egyptian stamp, addressed to me in an unknown hand. It read as follows: ‘You did not recognize it, did you? I mean the handwriting on the envelope? I confess that I chuckled as I addressed it to you, before beginning this letter: I could see your face all of a sudden with its expression of perplexity. I saw you turn the letter over in your fingers for a moment trying to guess who had sent it! ‘It is the first serious letter I have attempted, apart from short notes, with my new hand: this strange accessory -after the -fact with which the good Amaril has equipped me! I wanted it to become word -perfect before I wrote to you. Of course I was frightened and disgusted by it at first, as you can imagine. But I have come to respect it very much, this delicate and beautiful steel contrivance which lies beside me so quietly on the table in its green velvet glove! Nothing falls out as one imagines it. I could not have believed myself accepting it so completely — steel and rubber seem such strange allies for human flesh. But the hand has proved itself almost more competent even than an ordinary flesh -and -blood member! In fact its powers are so com prehensive that I am a little frightened of it. I can undertake the most delicate of tasks, even turning the pages of a book, as well as the coarser ones. But most important of all — ah! Darley I tremble as I write the words — IT can paint! ‘I have crossed the border and entered into the possession of my kingdom, thanks to the Hand. Nothing about this was pre meditated. One day it took up a brush and lo! pictures of truly troubling originality and authority were born. I have five of them now. I stare at them with reverent wonder. Where did they come from? But I know that the Hand was responsible. And this new handwriting is also one of its new inventions, tall and purposeful and tender. Don’t think I boast. I am speaking with the utmost objectivity, for I know that I am not responsible. It is the Hand alone which has contrived to slip me through the barriers into the company of the Real Ones as Pursewarden used to say. Yet it is a bit frightening; the elegant velvet glove guards its secret perfectly. If I wear both gloves a perfect anonymity is preserved! I watch with wonder and a certain distrust, as one might a beauti ful and dangerous pet like a panther, say. There is nothing, it seems, that it cannot do impressively better than I can. This will explain my silence and I hope excuse it. I have been totally absorbed in this new hand -language and the interior metamor phosis it has brought about. All the roads have opened before me, everything seems now possible for the first time. ‘On the table beside me as I write lies my steamship ticket to France; yesterday I knew with absolute certainty that I must go there. Do you remember how Pursewarden used to say that artists, like sick cats, knew by instinct exactly which herb they needed to effect a cure: and that the bitter -sweet herb of their self -discovery only grew in one place, France? Within ten days I shall be gone! And among so many new certainties there is one which has raised its head — the certainty that you will follow me there in your own good time. I speak of certainty not prophecy — I have done with fortune -tellers once and for all! ‘This, then, is simply to give you the dispositions which the Hand has imposed on me, and which I accept with eagerness and gratitude — with resignation also. This last week I have been paying a round of good -bye visits, for I think it will be some long time before I see Alexandria again. It has become stale and profitless to me. And yet how can we but help love the places which have made us suffer? Leave -takings are in the air; it’s as if the whole composition of our lives were being suddenly drawn away by a new current. For I am not the only person who is leaving the place — far from it. Mountolive, for example, will be leaving in a couple of months; by a great stroke of luck he has been given the plum post of his profession, Paris! With this news all the old uncertainties seem to have vanished; last week he was secretly married! You will guess to whom. ‘Another deeply encouraging thing is the return and recovery of dear old Pombal. He is back at the Foreign Office now in a senior post and seems to have recovered much of his old form to judge by the long exuberant letter he sent me. “How could I have forgotten” he writes “that there are no women in the world except French women? It is quite mysterious. They are the most lovely creation of the Almighty. And yet … dear Clea, there are so very many of them, and each more perfect than the other. What is one poor man to do against so many, against such an army? For Godsake ask someone, anyone, to bring up reinforcements. Wouldn’t Darley like to help an old friend out for old times’ sake?” ‘I pass you the invitation for what it is worth. Amaril and Semira will have a child this month — a child with the nose I invented! He will spend a year in America on some job or other, taking them with him. Balthazar also is off on a visit to Smyrna and Venice. My most piquant piece of news, however, I have saved for the last. Justine! ‘This I do not expect you to believe. Nevertheless I must put it down. Walking down Rue Fuad at ten o’clock on a bright spring morning I saw her come towards me, radiant and beautifully turned out in a spring frock of eloquent design: and flop flop flop beside her on the dusty pavements, hopping like a toad, the detested Memlik! Clad in elastic -sided boots with spats. A cane with a gold knob. And a newly minted flower -pot on his fuzzy crown. I nearly collapsed. She was leading him along like a poodle. One almost saw the cheap leather leash attached to his collar. She greeted me with effusive warmth and introduced me to her captive who shuffled shyly and greeted me in a deep groaning voice like a bass saxophone. They were on their way to meet Nessim at the Select. Would I go too? Of course would. You know how tirelessly curious I am. She kept shooting secret sparks of amusement at me without Memlik seeing. Her eyes were sparkling with delight, a sort of impish mockery. It was as if, like some powerful engine of destruction, she had suddenly switched on again. She has never looked happier or younger. When we absented ourselves to powder our noses I could only gasp: “Justine! Memlik! What on earth?” She gave a peal of laughter and giving me a great hug said: “I have found his point faible. He is hungry for society. He wants to move in social circles in Alexandria and meet a lot of white women!” More laughter. “But what is the object?” I said in bewilderment. Here all at once she became serious, though her eyes sparkled with clever malevo lence. “We have started something, Nessim and I. We have made a break through at last. Clea, I am so happy, I could cry. It is something much bigger this time, international. We will have to go to Switzerland next year, probably for good. Nessim’s luck has suddenly changed. I can’t tell you any details.” ‘When we reached the table upstairs Nessim had already arrived and was talking to Memlik. His appearance staggered me, he looked so much younger, and so elegant and self possessed. It gave me a queer pang, too, to see the passionate way t h e y e m b r a c e d , N e s s i m a n d J u s t i n e , a s i f o b l iv i o u s t o t h e r e s t o f t h e w o r l d . R i g h t t h e r e i n t h e p a s s i o n t h a t I d i d n o t k n o w w h e r e t o l o o k . c a f é , w i t h s u c h e c s t a t i c ‘Memlik sat there with his expensive gloves on his knee, smiling gently. It was clear that he enjoyed the life of high society, and I could see from the way he offered me an ice that he also enjoyed the company of white women! ‘Ah! it is getting tired, this miraculous hand. I must catch the evening post with this letter. There are a hundred things to attend to before I start the bore of packing. As for you, wise one, I have a feeling that you too perhaps have stepped across the threshold into the kingdom of your imagination, to t a k e p o s s e s s i o n o f i t o n c e a n d f o r a l l . W r i t e a n d t e l l m e — o r s a v e i t f o r s o m e s m a l l c a f é u n d e r w e a t h e r , b y a c h e s t n u t -t r e e , i n s m o k y a u t u m n the Seine. ‘I wait, quite serene and happy, a real human being, an artist at last. ‘Clea.’

But it was to be a little while yet before the clouds parted before me to reveal the secret landscape of which she was writing, and which she would henceforward appropriate, brushstroke by slow brushstroke. It had been so long in forming inside me, this precious image, that I too was as unprepared as she had been. It came on a blue day, quite unpremeditated, quite unannounced, and with such ease I would not have believed it. I had been until then like some timid girl, scared of the birth of her first child. Yes, one day I found myself writing down with trembling fingers the four words (four letters! four faces!) with w h i c h e v e r y s t o r y -t e l l e r s i n c e t h e w o r l d b e g a n h a s s t a k e d h i s s l e n d e r c l a i m t o t h e a t t e n t i o n o f h i s f e l lo w -m e n . Wo r d s w h i c h p r e s a g e s i m p l y t h e o l d s to r y o f a n a r t i s t c o m i n g o f ag e . I w r o t e : ‘ O n c e u p o n a time….’ And I felt as if the whole universe had given me a nudge!

The End