But when I overtook her and halted her the face she turned to me was that of a sick demon. She was in a towering rage. ‘You thought I simply wanted to make love? God! haven’t we had enough of that? How is it that you do not know what I feel for once? How is it?’ She stamped her foot in the wet sand. It was not merely that a geological fault had opened in the ground upon which we had been treading with such self-confidence. It was as if some long-disused mineshaft in my own character had suddenly fallen in. I recognized that this barren traffic in ideas and feelings had driven a path through towards the denser jungles of the heart; and that here we became bondsmen in the body, possessors of an enigmatic knowledge which could only be passed on — received, deciphered, understood — by those rare complementaries of ours in the world. (How few they were, how seldom one found them!)
‘After all’ I remember her saying, ‘this has nothing to do with sex’ which tempted me to laugh though I recognized in the phrase her desperate attempt to dissociate the flesh from the message it carried. I suppose this sort of thing always happens to bankrupts when they fall in love. I saw then what I should have seen long before: namely that our friendship had ripened to a point when we had already become in a way part-owners of each other.
I think we were both horrified by the thought; for exhausted as we were we could not help but quail before such a relationship. We did not say any more but walked back along the beach to where we had left our clothes, speechless and hand in hand. Justine looked utterly exhausted. We were both dying to get away from each other, in order to examine our own feelings. We did not speak to each other again. We drove into the city and she dropped me at the usual corner near my flat. I snapped the door of the car closed and she drove off without a word or a glance in my direction.
As I opened the door of my room I could still see the imprint of Justine’s foot in the wet sand. Melissa was reading, and looking up at me she said with characteristic calm foreknowledge: ‘Something has happened — what is it?’ I could not tell her since I did not myself know. I took her face in my hands and examined it silently, with a care and attention, with a sadness and hunger I don’t ever remember feeling before. She said: ‘It is not me you are seeing, it is someone else.’ But in truth I was seeing Melissa for the first time. In some paradoxical way it was Justine who was now permitting me to see Melissa as she really was — and to recognize my love for her. Melissa smilingly reached for a cigarette and said: ‘You are falling in love with Justine’ and I answered as sincerely, as honestly, as painfully as I could: ‘No Melissa, it is worse than that’ — though I could not for the life of me have explained how or why.
When I thought of Justine I thought of some great freehand composition, a cartoon of a woman representing someone released from bondage in the male. ‘Where the carrion is’ she once quoted proudly from Boehme, speaking of her native city, ‘there the eagles will gather.’ Truly she looked and seemed an eagle at this moment. But Melissa was a sad painting from a winter landscape contained by dark sky; a window-box with a few flowering geraniums lying forgotten on the windowsill of a cement-factory.
There is a passage in one of Justine’s diaries which comes to mind here. I translate it here because though it must have referred to incidents long preceding those which I have recounted yet nevertheless it almost exactly expresses the curiously ingrown quality of a love which I have come to recognize as peculiar to the city rather than to ourselves. ‘Idle’ she writes ‘to imagine falling in love as a correspondence of minds, of thoughts; it is a simultaneous firing of two spirits engaged in the autonomous act of growing up.
And the sensation is of something having noiselessly exploded inside each of them. Around this event, dazed and preoccupied, the lover moves examining his or her own experience; her gratitude alone, stretching away towards a mistaken donor, creates the illusion that she communicates with her fellow, but this is false.
The loved object is simply one that has shared an experience at the same moment of time, narcissistically; and the desire to be near the beloved object is at first not due to the idea of possessing it, but simply to let the two experiences compare themselves, like reflections in different mirrors. All this may precede the first look, kiss, or touch; precede ambition, pride or envy; precede the first declarations which mark the turning point — for from here love degenerates into habit, possession, and back to loneliness.’ How characteristic and how humourless a delineation of the magical gift: and yet how true … of Justine!
‘Every man’ she writes elsewhere, and here I can hear the hoarse and sorrowful accents of her voice repeating the words as she writes them: ‘Every man is made of clay and daimon, and no woman can nourish both.’ That afternoon she went home to find that Nessim had arrived by the afternoon plane. She complained of feeling feverish and went early to bed. When he came to sit by her side and take her temperature she said something which struck him as interesting enough to remember — for long afterwards he repeated it to me:
‘This is nothing of medical interest — a small chill. Diseases are not interested in those who want to die.’ And then with one of those characteristic swerves of association, like a swallow turning in mid-air she added, ‘Oh! Nessim, I have always been so strong.
Has it prevented me from being truly loved?’
*******
It was through Nessim that I first began to move with any freedom in the great cobweb of Alexandrian society; my own exiguous earnings did not even permit me to visit the night-club where Melissa danced. At first I was a trifle ashamed of being forever on the receiving end of Nessim’s hospitality, but we were soon such fast friends that I went everywhere with them and never gave the matter a thought. Melissa unearthed an ancient dinner-jacket from one of my trunks and refurbished it. It was in their company that I first visited the club where she danced. It was strange to sit between Justine and Nessim and watch the flaky white light suddenly blaze down upon a Melissa I could no longer recognize under a layer of paint which gave her gentle face an air of gross and precocious unimaginativeness. I was horrified too at the banality of her dancing, which was bad beyond measure; yet watching her make those gentle and ineffectual movements of her slim hands and feet (the air of a gazelle harnessed to a waterwheel) I was filled with tenderness at her mediocrity, at the dazed and selfdeprecating way she bowed to the lukewarm applause. Afterwards she was made to carry a tray round and take up a collection for the orchestra, and this she did with a hopeless timidity, coming to the table where I sat with lowered eyes under those ghastly false lashes, and with trembling hands. My friends did not know at that time of our relationship; but I noticed Justine’s curious and mocking glance as I turned out my pockets and found a few notes to thrust into the tray with hands that shook not less than Melissa’s — so keenly did I feel her embarrassment.
Afterwards when I got back to the flat a little tipsy and exhilarated from dancing with Justine I found her still awake, boiling a kettle of water over the electric ring: ‘Oh, why’ she said ‘did you put all that money into the collecting tray? A whole week’s wages: are you mad? What will we eat tomorrow?’ We were both hopelessly improvident in money matters, yet somehow we managed better together than apart. At night, walking back late from the night-club, she would pause in the alley outside the house and if she saw my light still burning give a low whistle and I, hearing the signal, would put down the book I was reading and creep quietly down the staircase, seeing in my mind’s eye her lips pursed about that low liquid sound, as if to take the soft imprint of a brush. At the time of which I write she was still being followed about and importuned by the old man or his agents.