It was equally characteristic that by the time I reached the little flat and disinterred the grey exercise books in which my notes had been scribbled I thought no longer of destroying them. Indeed I sat there in the lamp-light and added to them while Pombal discoursed on life from the other easy chair.
‘Returning to my room I sit silent, listening to the heavy tone of her scent: a smell perhaps composed of flesh, faeces and herbs, all worked into the dense brocade of her being. This is a peculiar type of love for I do not feel that I possess her — nor indeed would wish to do so. It is as if we joined each other only in self-possession, became partners in a common stage of growth. In fact we outrage love, for we have proved the bonds of friendship stronger. These notes, however they may be read, are intended only as a painstaking affectionate commentary on a world into which I have been born to share my most solitary moments — those of coitus — with Justine. I can get no nearer to the truth.
‘Recently, when it had been difficult to see her for one reason or another, I found myself longing so much for her that I Went all the way down to Pietrantoni to try and buy a bottle of her perfume. In vain. The good-tempered girl-assistant dabbed my hands with every mark she had in stock and once or twice I thought that I had discovered it. But no. Something was always missing — I suppose the flesh which the perfume merely costumed. The undertow of the body itself was the missing factor. It was only when in desperation I mentioned Justine’s name that the girl turned immediately to the first perfume we had tried. “Why did you not say so at first?” she asked with an air of professional hurt; everyone, her tone implied, knew the perfume Justine used except myself. It was unrecognizable. Nevertheless I was surprised to discover that Jamais de la vie was not among the most expensive or exotic of perfumes.’
(When I took home the little bottle they found in Cohen’s waistcoat-pocket the wraith of Melissa was still there, imprisoned. She could still be detected.)
Pombal was reading aloud the long terrible passage from Moeurs which is called ‘The Dummy Speaks’. ‘In all these fortuitous collisions with the male animal I had never known release, no matter what experience I had submitted my body to. I always see in the mirror the image of an ageing fury crying: “J’ai raté mon propre amour — monamour àmoi.Monamour-propre,monpropre amour. Je l’ai raté.Je n’ai jamais souffert, jamais eu dejoiesimple etcan dide.”’
He paused only to say: ‘If this is true you are only taking advantage of an illness in loving her,’ and the remark struck me like the edge of an axe wielded by someone of enormous and unconscious strength.
* * * * *
When the time for the great yearly shoot on Lake Mareotis came round Nessim began to experience a magical sense of relief. He recognized at last that what had to be decided would be decided at this time and at no other. He had the air of a man who has fought a long illness successfully. Had his judgement indeed been so faulty even though it had not been conscious? During the years of his marriage he had repeated on every day the words, ‘I am so happy’ — fatal as the striking of a grandfather-clock upon which silence is forever encroaching. Now he could say so no longer. Their common life was like some cable buried in the sand which, in some inexplicable way, at a point impossible to discover, had snapped, plunging them both into an unaccustomed and impenetrable darkness.
The madness itself, of course, took no account of circumstances. It appeared to superimpose itself not upon personalities tortured beyond the bounds of endurance but purely upon a given situation. In a real sense we all shared it, though only Nessim acted it out, exemplified it in the flesh, as a person. The short period which preceded the great shoot on Mareotis lasted for perhaps a month — certainly for very little more. Here again to those who did not know him nothing was obvious. Yet the delusions multiplied themselves at such a rate that in his own records they give one the illusion of watching bacteria under a microscope — the pullulation of healthy cells, as in cancer, which have gone off their heads, renounced their power to repress themselves.
The mysterious series of code messages transmitted by the street names he encountered showed definite irrefutable signs of a supernatural agency at work full of the threat of unseen punishment — though whether for himself or for others he could not tell. Balthazar’s treatise lying withering in the window of a bookshop and the same day coming upon his father’s grave in the Jewish cemetery — with those distinguishing names engraved upon the stone which echoed all the melancholy of European Jewry in exile.
Then the question of noises in the room next door: a sort of heavy breathing and the sudden simultaneous playing of three pianos. These, he knew, were not delusions but links in an occult chain, logical and persuasive only to the mind which had passed beyond the frame of causality. It was becoming harder and harder to pretend to be sane by the standards of ordinary behaviour. He was going through the Devastatio described by Swedenborg.
The coal fires had taken to burning into extraordinary shapes. This could be proved by relighting them over and over again to verify his findings — terrifying landscapes and faces. The mole on Justine’s wrist was also troubling. At meal times he fought against his desire to touch it so feverishly that he turned pale and almost fainted.
One afternoon a crumpled sheet began breathing and continued for a space of about half an hour, assuming the shape of the body it covered. One night he woke to the soughing of great wings and saw a bat-like creature with the head of a violin resting upon the bedrail.
Then the counter-agency of the powers of good — a message brought by a ladybird which settled on the notebook in which he was writing; the music of Weber’s Pan played every day between three and four on a piano in an adjoining house. He felt that his mind had become a battle-ground for the forces of good and evil and that his task was to strain every nerve to recognize them, but it was not easy. The phenomenal world had begun to play tricks on him so that his senses were beginning to accuse reality itself of inconsistency. He was in peril of a mental overthrow.
Once his waistcoat started ticking as it hung on the back of a chair, as if inhabited by a colony of foreign heartbeats. But when investigated it stopped and refused to continue for the benefit of Selim whom he had called into the room. The same day he saw his initials in gold upon a cloud reflected in a shop-window in the Rue St Saba. Everything seemed proved by this.