We went, I remember, to a café on the sea-front and sat despondently before a black coffee while he croaked on about this historic watch. It was during this conversation that he said: ‘I think you know Justine. She has spoken to me warmly of you. She will bring you to the Cabal.’ ‘What is that?’ I asked. ‘We study the Cabbala’ he said almost shyly; ‘we are a sort of small lodge. She said you knew something about it and would be interested.’ This astonished me for I had never, as far as I knew, mentioned to Justine any line of study which I was pursuing — in between long bouts of lethargy and self-disgust. And as far as I knew the little suitcase containing the Hermetica and other books of the kind had always been kept under my bed locked. I said nothing however. He spoke now of Nessim, saying: ‘Of all of us he is the most happy in a way because he has no preconceived idea of what he wants in return for his love. And to love in such an unpremeditated way is something that most people have to re-learn after fifty. Children have it. So has he. I am serious.’
‘Did you know the writer Arnauti?’
‘Yes. The author of Moeurs.’
‘Tell me about him.’
‘He intruded on us, but he did not see the spiritual city underlying the temporal one. Gifted, sensitive, but very French. He found Justine too young to be more than hurt by her. It was ill luck. Had he found another a little older — all our women are Justines, you know, in different styles — he might have — I will not say written better, for his book is well written: but he might have found in it a sort of resolution which would have made it more truly a work of art.’
He paused and took a long pull at his pipe before adding slowly: ‘You see in his book he avoided dealing with a number of things which he knew to be true of Justine, but which he ignored for purely artistic purposes — like the incident of her child. I suppose he thought it smacked of melodrama.’
‘What child was this?’
‘Justine had a child, by whom I do not know. It was kidnapped and disappeared one day. About six years old. A girl. These things do happen quite frequently in Egypt as you know. Later she heard that it had been seen or recognized and began a frantic hunt for it through the Arab quarter of every town, through every house of ill-fame, since you know what happens to parentless children in Egypt. Arnauti never mentioned this, though he often helped her follow up clues, and he must have seen how much this loss contributed to her unhappiness.’
‘Who did Justine love before Arnauti?’
‘I cannot remember. You know many of Justine’s lovers remained her friends; but more often I think you could say that her truest friends were never lovers. The town is always ready to gossip.’
But I was thinking of a passage in Moeurs where Justine comes to meet him with a man who is her lover. Arnauti writes: ‘She embraced this man, her lover, so warmly in front of me, kissing him on the mouth and eyes, his cheeks, even his hands, that I was puzzled. Then it shot through me with a thrill that it was really me she was kissing in her imagination.’
Balthazar said quietly: ‘Thank God I have been spared an undue interest in love. At least the invert escapes this fearful struggle to give oneself to another. Lying with one’s own kind, enjoying an experience, one can still keep free the part of one’s mind which dwells in Plato, or gardening, or the differential calculus. Sex has left the body and entered the imagination now; that is why Arnauti suffered so much with Justine, because she preyed upon all that he might have kept separate — his artist-hood if you like. He is when all is said and done a sort of minor Antony, and she a Cleo. You can read all about it in Shakespeare. And then, as far as Alexandria is concerned, you can understand why this is really a city of incest — I mean that here the cult of Serapis was founded. For this etiolation of the heart and reins in love-making must make one turn inwards upon one’s sister. The lover mirrors himself like Narcissus in his own family: there is no exit from the predicament.’
All this was not very comprehensible to me, yet vaguely I felt a sort of correspondence between the associations he employed; and certainly much of what he said seemed to — not explain, but to offer a frame to the picture of Justine — the dark, vehement creature in whose direct and energetic handwriting I had first read this quotation from Laforgue: ‘Je n’ai pas une jeune fille qui saurait me goûter. Ah! oui, une garde-malade! Une garde-malade pour l’amour de l’art, ne donnant ses baisers qu’à des mourants, des gens in extremis….’ Under this she wrote: ‘Often quoted by A and at last discovered by accident in Laforgue.’
‘Have you fallen out of love with Melissa?’ said Balthazar suddenly. ‘I do not know her. I have only seen her. Forgive me. I have hurt you.’
It was at this time that I was becoming aware of how much Melissa was suffering. But not a word of reproach ever escaped her lips, nor did she ever speak of Justine. But she had taken on a lacklustre, unloved colour — her very flesh; and paradoxically enough though I could hardly make love to her without an effort, yet I felt myself at this time to be more deeply in love with her than ever. I was gnawed by a confusion of feelings and a sense of frustration which I had never experienced before; it made me sometimes angry with her.
It was so different from Justine, who was experiencing much the same confusion as myself between her ideas and her intentions, when she said: ‘Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me, and then show me the place where he was hanged.’
* * * * *
Of the Cabal itself, what is there to be said? Alexandria is a town of sects and gospels. And for every ascetic she has always thrown up one religious libertine — Carpocrates, Anthony — who was prepared to founder in the senses as deeply and truly as any desert father in the mind. ‘You speak slightingly of syncretism’ said Balthazar once, ‘but you must understand that to work here at all — and I am speaking now as a religious maniac not a philosopher — one must try to reconcile two extremes of habit and behaviour which are not due to the intellectual disposition of the inhabitants, but to their soil, air, landscape. I mean extreme sensuality and intellectual asceticism. Historians always present syncretism as something which grew out of a mixture of warring intellectual principles; that hardly states the problem. It is not even a question of mixed races and tongues. It is the national peculiarity of the Alexandrians to seek a reconciliation between the two deepest psychological traits of which they are conscious. That is why we are hysterics and extremists. That is why we are the incomparable lovers we are.’