prism-sightedness

excerpts from justine by lawrence durrell

notes for landscape-tones. . . . long sequences of tempera. light filtered through the essence of lemons. an air full of brick-dust -- sweet-smelling brick-dust and the odour of hot pavements slaked with water. light damp clouds, earth-bound, yet seldom bringing rain. upon this squirt dust-red, dust-green, chalk-mauve and watered crismon-lake. in summer the sea-damp lightly varnished the air. everything lay under a coat of gum.

and then in autumn the dry, palpitant air, harsh with static electricity, inflaming the body through its light clothing. the flesh coming alive, trying the bars of its prison. a drunken whore walks in a dark street at night, shedding snatches of song-like petals.

* * * * *

i will say only that in many things she thought as a man, while in her actions she enjoyed some of the free vertical independence of the masculine outlook. our intimacy was of a strange mental order. quite early on i discovered that she could mind-read in an unerring fashion. ideas came to us simultaneously. i remember once being made aware that she was sharing in her mind a thought which had just presented itself to mine, namely: "this intimacy should go no further, for we have already exhausted all its possibilities in our respective imaginations: and what we shall end by discovering, behind the darkly woven colours of sensuality, will be a friendship so profound that we shall become bondsmen forever". it was, if you like, the flirtation of minds prematurely exhausted by experience which seemed so much more dangerous than a love founded in sexual attraction.

knowing how much she loved nessim and loving him so much myself, i could not contemplate this thought without terror. she lay beside me, breathing lightly, and staring at the cherub-haunted ceiling with her great eyes. i said: "it can come to nothing, this love-affair between a poor schoolteacher and an alexandrian society woman. how bitter it would be to have it all end in a conventional scandal which would leave us alone together and give you the task of deciding how to dispose of me." justine hated to hear the truth spoken. she turned upon one elbow and lowering those magnificent troubled eyes to mine she stared at me for a long moment. "there is no choice in this matter," she said in that hoarse voice i had come to love so much. "you talk as if there was a choice. we are not strong or evil enough to exercise choice. all this is part of an experiment arranged by something else, the city perhaps, or another part of ourselves. how do i know?"

i remember her sitting before the multiple mirrors at the dressmaker's, being fitted for a shark-skin costume, and saying: "look! five different pictures of the same subject. now if i wrote i would try for a multi-dimensional effect in character, a sort of prism-sightedness. why should not people show more than one profile at a time?"

* * * * *

"what do you believe? you never say anything. at the most your sometimes laugh." i did not know how to reply for all ideas seem equally good to me; the fact of their existence proves that someone is creating. does it matter whether they are objectively right or wrong? they could never remain so for long. "but it matters," she cried with a touching emphasis. "it matters deeply my darling, deeply."

we are the children of our landscape; it dictates behaviour and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it. i can think of no better identification. "your doubt, for example, which contains so much anxiety and such a thirst for an absolute truth, is so different from the scepticism of the greek, from the mental play of the mediterranean mind with its deliberate resort to sophistry as part of the game of thought; but your thought is a weapon, a theology."

"but how else can action be judged?" "it cannot be judged comprehensively until thought itself can be judged, for our thoughts themselves are acts. it is an attempt to make partial judgements upon either that leads to misgivings."

i liked so much the way she would suddenly sit down on a wall, or a broken pillar in that shattered backyard to pompey's pillar, and be plunged in an inexorable sorrow at some idea whose impact had only just made itself felt in her mind. "you really believe so?" she would say with such sorrow that one was touched and amused at the same time. "and why do you smile? you always smile at the most serious things. ah! surely you should be sad?" if she ever knew me at all she must later have discovered that for those of us who feel deeply and who are at all conscious of the inextricable tangle of human thought there is only response to be made -- ironic tenderness and silence.

* * * * *

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 know myself. 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 how 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?"