The Alexandria Quartet Read Free Page B

must speak from experience for the succession of visitors to the little flat is endless, and rarely does one see the same face twice. ‘To a Frenchman the love here is interesting. They act before they reflect. When the time comes to doubt, to suffer remorse, it is too hot, nobody has the energy. It lacks finesse , this animalism, but it suits me. I’ve worn out my heart and head with love, and want to be left alone — above all, mon cher , from this Judeo-Coptic mania for dissection , for analysing the subject. I want to return to my farmhouse in Normandy heart-whole.’
    For long periods of the winter he is away on leave and I have the little dank flat to myself and sit up late, correcting exercise books, with only the snoring Hamid for company. In this last year I have reached a dead-end in myself. I lack the will-power to do anything with my life, to better my position by hard work, to write: even to make love. I do not know what has come over me. This is the first time I have experienced a real failure of the will to survive. Occasionally I turn over a bundle of manuscript or an old proof-copy of a novel or book of poems with disgusted inattention; with sadness, like someone studying an old passport.
    From time to time one of Georges’ numerous girls strays into my net by calling at the flat when he is not there, and the incident serves for a while to sharpen my taedium vitae . Georges is thoughtful and generous in these matters for, before going away (knowing how poor I am) he often pays one of the Syrians from Golfo’s tavern in advance, and orders her to spend an occasional night in the flat en disponibilité , as he puts it. Her duty is to cheer me up, by no means an enviable task especially as on the surface there is nothing to indicate lack of cheerfulness on my part. Small talk has become a useful form of automatism which goes on long after one has lost the need to talk; if necessary I can even make love with relief, as one does not sleep very well here: but without passion, without attention.
    Some of these encounters with poor exhausted creatures driven to extremity by physical want are interesting, even touching, but I have lost any interest in sorting my emotions so that they exist for me like dimensionless figures flashed on a screen. ‘There are only three things to be done with a woman’ said Clea once. ‘You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.’ I was experiencing a failure in all these domains of feeling.
    I record this only to show the unpromising human material upon which Melissa elected to work, to blow some breath of life into my nostrils. It could not have been easy for her to bear the double burden to her own poor circumstances and illness. To add my burdens to hers demanded real courage. Perhaps it was born of desperation, for she too had reached the dead level of things, as I myself had. We were fellow-bankrupts.
    For weeks her lover, the old furrier, followed me about the streets with a pistol sagging in the pocket of his overcoat. It was consoling to learn from one of Melissa’s friends that it was unloaded, but it was nevertheless alarming to be haunted by this old man. Mentally we must have shot each other down at every street corner of the city. I for my part could not bear to look at that heavy pock-marked face with its bestial saturnine cluster of tormented features smeared on it — could not bear to think of his gross intimacies with her: those sweaty little hands covered as thickly as a porcupine with black hair. For a long time this went on and then after some months an extraordinary feeling of intimacy seemed to grow up between us. We nodded and smiled at each other when we met. Once, encountering him at a bar, I stood for nearly an hour beside him; we were on the point of talking to each other, yet somehow neither of us had the courage to begin it. There was no common subject of conversation save Melissa. As I was