PART III

 

X

 

'I suppose (writes Balthazar) that if you wished somehow to incorporate all I am telling you into your own Justine manuscript now, you would find yourself with a curious sort of book - the story would be told, so to speak, in layers.  Unwittingly I may have supplied you with a form, something out of the way!  Not unlike Pursewarden's idea of a series of novels with "sliding panels" as he called them.  Or else, perhaps, like some medieval palimpsest where different sorts of truth are thrown down one upon the other, the one obliterating or perhaps supplementing another.  Industrious monks scraping away an elegy to make room for a verse of Holy Writ!

      'I don't suppose such an analogy would be a bad one to apply to the reality of Alexandria, a city at once sacred and profane; between Theocritus, Plotinus, and the Septuagint one moves on intermediate levels which are those of race as much as anything - like saying Copt, Greek and Jew or Moslem, Turk and Armenian.... Am I wrong?  These are the slow accretions of time itself on place.  Just as life on the individual face lays down, wash by successive wash, the wrinkles of experiences in which laughter and tears are utterly indistinguishable.  Wormcasts of experience on the sands of life....'

      So writes my friend, and he is right; for the Interlinear now raises for me much more than the problem of objective 'truth to life', or if you like 'to fiction'.  It raises, as life itself does - whether one makes or takes it - the harder-grained question of form.  How then am I to manipulate this mass of crystallized data in order to work out the meaning of it and so give a coherent picture of this impossible city of love and obscenity?

      I wish I knew.  I wish I knew.  So much has been revealed to me by all this that I feel myself to be, as it were, standing upon the threshold of a new book - a new Alexandria.  The old evocative outlines which I drew, intertwining them with the names of the city's exemplars - Cavafy, Alexander, Cleopatra and the rest - were subjective ones.  I had made the image my own jealous personal property, and it was true yet only within the limitations of a truth only partially perceived.  Now, in the light of all these new treasures - for truth, though merciless as love, must always be a treasure - what should I do?  Extend the frontiers of original truth, filling in which the rubble of this new knowledge the foundations upon which to build a new Alexandria?  Or should the dispositions remain the same, the characters remain the same - and is it only truth itself which has changed in contradiction?

      All this spring on my lonely island I have been weighed down by this grotesque information, which has so altered my feelings about things - oddly enough even about things past.  Can emotions be retrospective, retroactive?

      So much I wrote was based upon Justine's fears of Nessim - genuine fears, genuinely expressed.  I have seen with my own eyes that cold speechless jealousy upon his face - and seen the fear written on hers.  Yet now Balthazar says that Nessim would never have done her harm.  What am I to believe?

            We dined so often together, the four of us; and there I sat speechless and drunk upon the memory of her actual kisses, believing (only because she told me so) that the presence of the fourth - Pursewarden - would lull Nessim's jealous brain and offer us the safety of chaperonage!  Yet if now I am to believe Balthazar, it was I who was the decoy.  (Do I remember, or only imagine, a special small smile which from time to time would appear at the corner of Pursewarden's lips, perhaps cynical or perhaps comminatory?)  I thought then that I was sheltering behind the presence of the writer while he was in fact sheltering behind mine!  I am prevented from fully believing this by ... what?  The quality of a kiss from the lips of one who could murmur, like a being submitting its body to the rack, the words 'I love you.'  Of course, of course.  I am an expert in love - every man believes himself to be one: but particularly the Englishman.  So I am to believe in the kiss rather than in the statements of my friend?  Impossible, for Balthazar does not lie....

      Is love by its very nature a blindness?  Of course, I know I averted my face from the thought that Justine might be unfaithful to me while I possessed her - who does not?  It would have been too painful a truth to accept, although in my heart of hearts I knew full well, that she could never be faithful to me for ever.  If I ever dared to whisper the thought to myself I hastily added, like every husband, every lover, 'But of course, whatever she does, I am the one she truly loves!'  The sophistries which console - the lies which keep love going!

      Not that she herself ever gave me direct reason to doubt.  I do however remember an occasion on which the faintest breath of suspicion roused itself against Pursewarden, only to be immediately stilled.  He walked out of the studio one day towards us with some lipstick on his mouth.  But almost immediately I caught sight of the cigarette in his hand - he had obviously picked up a cigarette which Justine had left burning in an ashtray (a common habit with her), for the end of it was red.  In matters of love everything is easy to explain.

      The wicked Interlinear, freighted with these doubts, presses like a blunt thumb, here and here, always in bruised places.  I have begun to copy it whole - the whole of it - slowly and painfully; not only to understand more clearly wherein it differs from my own version of reality, but also to catch a glimpse of it as a separate entity - as a manuscript existing in its own right, as the determined view of another eye upon events which I interpreted in my own way, because that was the way in which I lived them - or they lived me.  Did I really miss so much that was going on around me - the connotation of smiles, of chance words and gestures, messages scribbled with a finger in wine spilt upon a tabletop, addresses written in the corner of newspapers and folded over?  Must I now rework my own experiences in order to come to the heart of the truth?  'Truth has no heart,' writes Pursewarden.  'Truth is a woman.  That is why it is enigmatic.  Of women, the most we can say, not being Frenchmen, is that they are burrowing animals.'

      According to Balthazar, I have misread the order of Justine's fears insofar as they concerned Nessim.  The incident of the car I have recorded elsewhere; how she was racing towards Cairo one night to meet Pursewarden when the lights of the great moth-coloured Rolls went out. Blinded by darkness she lost control of it and swarmed off the road, bouncing from dune to dune and throwing up spouts of sand like the spray thrown up by the death-agonies of a whale.  Then 'whistling like an arrow' it buried itself to the windscreens in a dune and lay trembling and murmuring.  Fortunately, she was not hurt and had the presence of mind to switch off the engine.  But how had the accident come about?  In telling me of it she said that when the car was examined the wiring was found to have been filed down - by whom?

      This was, as far as I know, the first time that her fears concerning Nessim, and a possible attempt on her own life, became articulate.  She had spoken of his jealousy before, yes; but not of anything like this, not of anything so concrete - so truly Alexandrian.  My own alarm may well be imagined.

      You now Balthazar in his notes says that some ten days before this incident, she had seen Selim from the studio window walk across the lawn towards the car and there, believing himself unobserved, lift the bonnet to take out from under it one of the little wax rollers which she thought she recognized as part of the equipment belonging to the dictaphone which Nessim often used in the office.  He had wrapped the object in a cloth and carried it indoors.  She sat at the window for a long time, musing and smoking before acting.  Then she took the car out on to the desert road to a lonely place the better to examine it.  Under the bonnet she found a small apparatus which she did not recognize but which seemed to her to be possibly a recording machine.  Presumably a wire lead connected it to a small microphone buried somewhere among the coloured coils of the dashboard wiring, but she could not trace it.  With her nailfile, however, she cut the wire at several points while leaving the whole contrivance in place and apparently in working order.  It was now, according to Balthazar, that she must by accident have disturbed or half-severed one of the leads to the car's headlights.  At least, this is what she told him, though she gave me no such explanation.  If I am to believe him, all this time, while she went on and on about the heedless folly of our public behaviour and the risks we were taking, she was really drawing me on - trailing me before the eyes of Nessim like a cape before a bull!

      But this was only at first; later, says my friend, came something which really made her feel that some action against her was contemplated by her husband: namely the murder of Toto de Brunel during the carnival ball at the Cervonis'.  Why have I never mentioned this?  It is true that I was even there at the time, and yet somehow the whole incident, though it belonged to the atmosphere of the moment, escaped me in the press of other matters.  Alexandria had many such unsolved mysteries at that time.  And while I knew the interpretation Justine put upon it, I did not permit myself to believe it at the time.  Nevertheless, it is strange that I should not have mentioned it, even in passing.  Of course, the true explanation of the matter was only given to me months later: almost when I myself was on the point of leaving Alexandria for ever, as I thought.

      The carnival in Alexandria is a purely social affair - having no calendar relationship to the other religious festivals of the city.  I suppose it must have been instituted by the three or four great Catholic families in the place - perhaps vicariously they enjoyed through it a sense of identity with the other side of the Mediterranean, with Venice and Athens.  Nevertheless, there is today no rich family which does not keep a cupboard full of velvet dominoes against the three days of folly - be it Copt, Moslem or Jewish.  After New Year's Eve it is perhaps the greatest Christian celebration of the year - for the ruling spirit of the three days and three nights is - utter anonymity: the anonymity conferred by the grim black velvet domino which shrouds identity and sex, prevents one distinguishing between man and woman, wife and lover, friend and enemy.

      The maddest aberrations of the city now come boldly forward under the protection of the invisible lords of Misrule who preside at this season.  No sooner has darkness fallen than the maskers begin to appear in the streets - first in ones and twos, then in small companies, often with musical instruments or drums, laughing and singing their way to some great house or to some nightclub where already the frosty air is bathed in the nigger warmth of jazz - the cloying grunting intercourse of saxophones and drums.  Everywhere they spring up in the pale moonlight, cowled like monks.  The disguise gives them all a gloomy fanatical uniformity of outline which startled the white-robed Egyptians and fills them with alarm - the thrill of a fear which spices the wild laughter pouring out of the houses, carried by the light offshore winds towards the cafés on the seafront; a gaiety which by its very shrillness seems to tremble always upon the edge of madness.

      Slowly the bluish spring moon climbs the houses, sliding up the minarets into the clicking palm-trees, and with it the city seems to uncurl like some hibernating animal dug out of its winter earth, to stretch and begin to drink in the music of the three-day festival.

      The jazz pouring up from the cellars displaces the tranquil winter air in the parks and thoroughfares, mingling as it reaches the sealine with the drumming perhaps of a liner's screws in the deepwater reaches of the estuary.  Or you may hear and see for a brief moment the rip and slither of fireworks against a sky which for a moment curls up at the edges and blushes, like a sheet of burning carbon paper: wild laughter which mixes with the hoarse mooing of an old ship outside the harbour bar - like a cow locked outside a gate.

      'The lover fears the carnival' says the proverb.  And with the emergence of these black-robed creatures of the night everywhere, all is subtly altered.  The whole temperature of life in the city alters, grows warm with the subtle intimations of spring.  Carni vale - the flesh's farewell to the year, unwinding its mummy wrappings of sex, identity and name, and stepping forward naked into the futurity of the dream.

      All the great houses have thrown open their doors upon fabulous interiors warm with a firelight which bristles upon china and marble, brass and copper, and upon the blackleaded faces of the servants as they go about their duties.  And down every street now, glittering in the moonlit gloaming, lounge the great limousines of the brokers and gamblers, like liners in dock, the patient and impressive symbols of a wealth which is powerless to bring true leisure or peace of mind, for it demands everything of the human soul.  They lie webbed in a winter light, expressing only the silence and power of all machinery which waits for the fall of man, looking on at the maskers as they cross and recross the lighted windows of the great houses, clutching each other like black bears, dancing to the throb of nigger music, the white man's solace.

      Snatches of music and laughter must rise to Clea's window where she sits with a board on her knees, patiently drawing while her little cat sleeps in its basket at her feet.  Or perhaps in some sudden lull the chords of a guitar may be plucked to stay and wallow in the darkness of the open street until they are joined by a voice raised in remote song, as if from the bottom of a well.  Or screams, cries for help.

      But what stamps the carnival with its spirit of pure mischief is the velvet domino - conferring upon its wearers the disguise which each man in his secret heart desires above all.  To become anonymous in an anonymous crowd, revealing neither sex nor relationship nor even facial expression - for the mask of this demented friar's habit leaves only two eyes, glowing like the eyes of a Moslem woman or a bear.  Nothing else to distinguish one by; the thick folds of the blackness conceal even the contours of the body.  Everyone becomes hipless, breastless, faceless.  And concealed beneath the carnival habit (like a criminal desire in the heart, a temptation impossible to resist, an impulse which seems preordained) lie the germs of something: of a freedom which man has seldom dared to imagine for himself.  One feels free in this disguise to do whatever one likes without prohibition.  All the best murders in the city, all the most tragic cases of mistaken identity, are the fruit of the yearly carnival; while most love affairs begin or end during these three days and nights during which we are delivered from the thrall of personality, from the bondage of ourselves.  Once inside the velvet cape and hood, and wife loses husband, husband wife, lover the beloved.  The air becomes crisp with the saltpetre of feuds and follies, the fury of battles, of agonizing night-long searches, of despairs.  You cannot tell whether you are dancing with a man or a woman.  The dark tides of Eros, which demand full secrecy if they are to overflow the human soul, burst out during carnival like something long damned up and raise the forms of strange primeval creatures - the perversions which are, I suppose, the psyche's ailment - in forms which you would think belonged to the Bocken or to Eblis.  Now hidden satyr and maenad can rediscover each other and unite.  Yes, who can help but love carnival when in it all debts are paid, all crimes expiated or committed, all illicit desires sated - without guilt or premeditation, without the penalties which  conscience or society exact?

      But I am wrong about one thing - for there is one distinguishing mark by which your friend or enemy may still identify you: your hands.  You lover's hands, if you have ever noticed them at all, will lead you to her in the thickest press of maskers.  Or by arrangement she may wear, as Justine does, a familiar ring - the ivory intaglio taken from the tomb of a dead Byzantine youth - worn upon the forefinger of the right hand.  But this is all, and it is only just enough.  (Pray that you are not as unlucky as Amaril, who found the perfect woman during carnival but could not persuade her to raise her hood and stand identified.  They talked all night, lying in the grass by the fountain, making love together with their velvet faces touching, their eyes caressing each other.  For a whole year now, he has gone about the city trying to find a pair of human hands, like a madman.  But hands are so alike!  She swore, this woman of his, that she would come back next year to the same place, wearing the same ring with its small yellow stone.  And so tonight he will wait trembling for a pair of hands by the lily-pond - hands which will perhaps never appear again in his life.  Perhaps she was after all an afreet or a vampire - who knows?  Yet years later, in another book, in another context, he will happen upon her again, almost by accident, but not here, not in these pages too tangled already by the record of ill-starred loves....)

      So then you walk the dark streets, serene as a murderer unidentified, all your traces covered by the black cowl, feeling the fresh wintry airs of the city upon your eyelids.  The Egyptians you pass look askance at you, not knowing whether to smile or be afraid at your appearance.  They hover in an indeterminate state of mind when carnival comes on - wondering how it should be taken.  Passing, you give them a burning stare from the depths of your cowl, glad to see them flinch and avert their faces.  Other dominoes like yourself emerge from every corner, some in groups laughing and singing as they walk towards some great house or to neighbouring nightclubs.

      Walking like this towards the Cervonis', across the network of streets by the Greek Patriarchate, you are reminded of other carnivals, perhaps even in other cities, distinguished by the same wildness and gaiety which is the gift of lost identities.  Strange adventures which befell you once.  At one corner in the Rue Bartout last year the sound of running feet and cries.  A man presents a dagger to your throat, crying, like a wounded animal, 'Helen, if you try and run away tonight I swear I'll kill ...' but the words die as you raise your mask and show your face, and he stammers an apology as he turns away only to burst into sobs and throw himself against an iron railing.  Helen has already disappeared, and he will search for her the whole night through!

      At a gate into a yard, weirdly lit by the feeble street-lamps, two figures in black are grappling each other, fighting with a tremendous silent fury.  They fall, rolling over and over from darkness into light and then back into darkness.  Without a word spoken.  At the Etoile there is a man hanging from a beam with his neck broken; but you get close enough you see that it is only a black domino hanging from a nail.  How strange that in order to free oneself from guilt by a disguise one should choose the very symbol of the Inquisitor, the cape and hood of the Spanish Inquisition.

      But they are not all in domino - for many people are superstitious about the dress and, besides, it can be hot to wear in a crowded room.  So you will see many a harlequin and shepherdess, many an Antony and Cleopatra as you walk the streets of the city, many an Alexander.  And as you turn into the great iron gates of the Cervonis' house to present your card and climb into the warmth and light and drunkenness within, you will see outlined upon the darkness the feared and beloved shapes and outlines of friends and familiars now distorted into the semblances of clowns and zanies, or clothed in the nothingness of black capes and hoods, infernally joined in a rare and disoriented gaiety.

      As if under pressure the laughter squirts up to the ceiling or else, like feathers from a torn quilt, drifts about in clumps in that fevered air.  The two string bands, muted by the weight of human voices, labour on in the short staggered rhythms of a maniac jazz - like the steady beating of an airpump.  Here on the ballroom floor a million squeakers and trumpets squash and distort the sound while already the dense weight of the coloured paper streamers, hanging upon the shoulders of the dancers, sway like tropical seaweed upon rock-surfaces and trails in ankle-high drifts about the polished floors.

      On the night in question, the first night of carnival, there was a dinner-party at the great house.  On the long hall sofas the dominoes waited for their tenants while the candlelight still smouldered upon the faces of a Justine and Nessim now framed among the portraits which the lined the ugly but imposing dining-room.  Faces painted in oils matched by human faces lined by preoccupations and maladies of the soul - all gathered together, made one in the classical brilliance of candlelight.  After dinner Justine and Nessim were to go together to the Cervoni ball according to the yearly custom.  According to custom too, Narouz at the last moment had excused himself.  He would arrive upon the stroke of ten, just in time to claim a domino before the whole party set off, laughing and chattering, for the ball.

      As always, he himself had preferred to ride into the city on his horse and to stable it with his friend the carpenter, but as a concession to the event he had struggled into an ancient suit of blue serge and had knotted a tie at his collar.  Undress did not matter, since he too would later be wearing a domino.  He walked lightly, swiftly across the ill-lit Arab quarter, drinking in the familiar sights and sounds, yet eager for the first sight of the maskers as he reached the end of Rue Fuad and found himself on the confines of the modern town.

      At one corner stood a group of shrill-chattering women in domino bent upon mischief.  From their language and accent he could detect at once that they were society women, Greeks.  These black harpies caught hold of every passer-by to shout jests at him and to pluck at his hood if he were masked.  Narouz too had to run the gauntlet: one caught hold of his hand and pretended to tell his fortune; another whispered a proposition in Arabic, setting his hand upon her thigh; the third cackled like a hen and shouted 'Your wife has a lover' and other unkindnesses.  He could not tell if they recognized him or not.

      Narouz flinched, shook himself and burst smiling through their number, fending them off good-naturedly and roaring with laughter at the sally about his wife.  'Not tonight, my doves,' he cried hoarsely in Arabic, thinking suddenly of Clea; and as they showed some disposition to capture him for the evening, he began to run.  They chased him a little way, shouting and laughing incoherently down the long dark street, but he easily outdistanced them, and so turned the corner to the great house, still smiling but a little out of breath, and flattered by these attentions which seemed to set the key for the evening's enjoyment.  In the silent hall his eye caught the black of dominoes and he put one on before edging open the door of the drawing-room behind which he could hear their voices.  It disguised his shabby suit.  The cape lay back upon his shoulders.

      They were all there by the fire, waiting for him, and he took their cries of welcome greedily and seriously, making his round to kiss Justine on the cheek and to shake hands with the rest in an agony of awkward silence.  He put on an artificially sincere expression, looking with distaste into the myopic eyes of Pierre Balbz (he hated him for the goatee and spats) and those of Toto de Brunel (an old lady's lapdog); but he liked the overblown rose, Athena Trasha, for she used the same scent as his mother; and he was sorry for Drusilla Banubula because she was so clever that she hardly seemed to be a woman at all.  With Pursewarden he shared a smile of easy complicity.  'Well,' he said, expelling his breath at last in relief.  His brother handed him a whisky with mild tenderness, which he drank slowly but all in one draught, like a peasant.

      'We were waiting for you, Narouz.'

      'The Hosnani exile,' glittered Pierre Balbz ingratiatingly.

      'The farmer,' cried little Toto.

      The conversation which had been interrupted by his sudden appearances closed smoothly over his head once more and he sat down by the fire until they should be ready to leave for the Cervoni house, folding his strong hands one upon the other in a gesture of finality, as if to lock up once and for all his powers.  The skin at Nessim's temples appeared to be stretched, he noticed, an old sign of anger or strain.  The fullness of Justine's dark beauty in her dress (the colour of hare's blood) glowed among the ikons, seeming to enjoy the semi-darkness of the candlelight - to feed upon it and give back the glitter of her barbaric jewellery.  Narouz felt full of a marvellous sense of detachment, of unconcern; what these small portents of trouble or stress meant, he did not know.  It was only Clea who flawed his self-sufficiency, who darkened the edges of his thought.  Each year he hoped that when he arrived at his brother's house he would find she had been included in the party.  Yet each year she was not, and in consequence he was forced to drift about all night in the darkness, searching for her as aimlessly as a ghost, not even really hoping to encounter her: and yet living upon the attenuated wraith of his fond hope as a soldier upon an iron ration.

      They had been talking that night of Amiril and his unhappy passion for a pair of anonymous hands and a carnival voice, and Pursewarden was telling one of his famous stories in that crisp uninflected French of his which was just a shade too perfect.

      'When I was twenty, I went to Venice for the first time at the invitation of an Italian poet with whom I had been corresponding, Carlo Negroponte.  For a middle-class English youth this was a great experience, to live virtually by candlelight in this huge tumbledown palazzo on the Grand Canal with a fleet of gondolas at my disposal - not to mention a huge wardrobe of cloaks lined with silk.  Negroponte was generous and spared no effort to entertain a fellow-poet in the best style.  He was then about fifty, frail and rather beautiful, like a rare kind of mosquito.  He was a prince and a diabolist, and his poetry happily married the influences of Byron and Baudelaire.  He went in for cloaks and shoes with buckles and silver walking-sticks and encouraged me to do the same.  I felt I was living in a Gothic novel.  Never have I written worse poetry.

      'That year we went to the carnival together and got separated though we each wore something to distinguish each other by; you know of course that carnival is the one time of the year when vampires walk freely abroad, and those who are wise carry a pig of garlic in their pockets to drive them off - if by chance one were to be encountered.  Next morning I went into my host's room and found him lying pale as death in bed, dressed in the white nightshirt with lace cuffs, with a doctor taking his pulse.  When the doctor had gone he said: "I have met the perfect woman, masked; I went home with her and she proved to be a vampire."  Then drawing up his nightshirt he showed me with exhausted pride that his body was covered with great bites, like the marks of a weasel's teeth.  He was utterly exhausted but at the same time excited - and frightening to relate, very much in love.  "Until you have experienced it," he said, "you have no idea what it is like.  To have one's blood sucked in darkness by someone one adores."  His voice broke.  "Sade could not begin to describe it.  I did not see her face, but I had the impression she was fair, of a northern fairness; we met in the dark and separated in the dark.  I have only the impression of white teeth, and a voice - never have I heard any woman say the things she says.  She is the very lover for whom I have been waiting all these years.  I am meeting her again tonight by the marble griffin at the Footpads' Bridge.  O my friend, be happy for me.  The real world had become more and more meaningless to me.  Now at last, with this vampire's love, I feel I can live again, feel again, write again!"  He spent all that day at his papers, and at nightfall set off, cloaked, in his gondola.  It was not my business to say anything.  The next day once more I found him, pale and deathly tired.  He had a high fever, and again these terrible bites.  But he could not speak of his experience without weeping - tears of love and exhaustion.  And it was now that he had begun his great poem which begins - you all know it -

 

                                                     "Lips not on lips, but on each other's wounds

                                                     Must suck the envenomed bodies of the loved

                                                     And through the tideless blood draw nourishment

                                                     To feel the love that feeds upon their deaths...."

 

      'The following week I left for Ravenna where I had some studies to make for a book I was writing and where I stayed two months.  I heard nothing from my host, but I got a letter from his sister to say that he was ill with a wasting disease which the doctors could not diagnose and that the family was much worried because he insisted on going out at night in his gondola on journeys of which he would not speak but from which he returned utterly exhausted.  I did not know what to reply to this.

      'From Ravenna, I went down to Greece and it was not until the following autumn that I returned.  I had sent a card to Negroponte saying I hoped to stay with him, but had no reply.  As I came down the Grand Canal a funeral was setting off in choppy water, by twilight, with the terrible plumes and emblems of death.  I saw that they were coming from the Negroponte Palazzo.  I landed and ran to the gates just as the last gondola in the procession was filling up with mourners and priests.  I recognized the doctor and joined him in the boat, and as we rowed stiffly across the canal, dashed with spray and blinking at the stabs of lightning, he told me what he knew.  Negroponte had died the day before.  When they came to lay out the body, the found the bites: perhaps of some tropical insect?  The doctor was vague.  "The only such bites I have seen," he said, "were during the plague of Naples when the rats had been at the bodies.  They were so bad we had to dust him down with talcum powder before we could let his sister see the body."

      Pursewarden took a long sip from his glass and went on wickedly: 'The story does not end there; for I should tell you how I tried to avenge him, and went myself at night to the Bridge of the Footpads - where according to the gondolier this woman always waited in the shadow.... But it is getting late, and anyway, I haven't made up the rest of the story as yet.'

      There was a good deal of laughter and Athena gave a well-bred shudder, drawing her shawl across her shoulders.  Narouz had been listening open-mouthed, with reeling senses, to this recital: he was spellbound.  'But,' he stammered, 'is all this true?'  Fresh laughter greeted his question.

      'Of course it's true,' said Pursewarden severely, and added: 'I have never been in Venice in my life.'

      And he rose, for it was time for them to be going, and while the impassive black servants waited they put on the velveteen capes and adjusted their masks like the actors they were, comparing their identical reflections as they stood side by side in the two swollen mirrors among the palms.  Giggles from Pierre and sallies of wit from Toto de Brunel; and so they stepped laughing into the clear night air, the inquisitors of pleasure and pain, the Alexandrians....

      The cars engulfed them while the solicitous domestics and chauffeurs tucked them in, carefully as bales of precious merchandise or spices, tenderly as flowers.  'I feel fragile,' squeaked Toto at these attentions.  'This side up with care, eh?  Which side up, I ask myself?'  He must have been the only person in the city not to know the answer to his own question.

      When they had started, Justine leaned forward in the car and plucked his sleeve.  'I want to whisper,' she said hoarsely though there was little need, for Nessim and Narouz were discussing something in harsh tones (Narouz' voice with the characteristic boyish break in it) and Athena was squibbling to Pierre like a flute.  'Toto ... listen.  One great service tonight, if you will.  I have put a chalk-mark on your sleeve, here, at the back.  Later on in the evening, I want to give you my ring to wear.  Shh. I want to disappear for an hour or so on my own.  Hush ... don't giggle.'  But there were squeaks from the velvet hood.  'You will have adventures in my name, dear Toto, while I am gone.  Do you agree?'

      He threw back his cape to show a delighted face, dancing eyes, and that grim little procurer's smile.  'Of course,' he whispered back, enraptures by the idea and full of admiration.  The featureless hood at his side from which the voice of Justine had issued like an oracle, glowed with a sort of death's-head beauty of its own, nodding at him in the light from the passing street-lamps.  The conversation and laughter around them sealed them in a conspiracy of private silence.  'Do you agree?' she said.

      'Darling, of course.'

      The two masked men in the front seats of the car might have been abbots of some medieval monastery, discussing theological niceties.  Athena, consumed by her own voice, still babbled away to Pierre.  'But of course.'

      Justine took his arm and turned back the sleeve to show him the chalk-mark she had made.  'I count on you,' she said, with some of the hoarse imperiousness of her speaking-voice, yet still in a whisper.  'Don't let me down!'  He took her hand and raised it to his Cupid's lips, kissing the ring from the dead finger of the Byzantine youth as one might kiss the holy picture which had performed a miracle long desired; he was to be turned from a man into a woman.  Then he laughed and cried: 'And my indiscretions will be on your head.  You will spend the rest of your days....'

      'Hush.'

      'What is all this?' cried Athena Trasha, scenting a joke or a scandal worth repetition.  'What indiscretions?'

      'My own,' cried Toto triumphantly into the darkness.  'My very own.'  But Justine lay back in the dark car impassively hooded, and did not speak.  'I can't wait to get there,' said Athena, and turned back to Pierre.  As the car turned into the gate of the Cervoni house, the light caught the intaglio, throwing into relief (colour of burnt milk) a Pan raping a goat, his hands grasping its horns, his head thrown back in ecstasy.  'Don't forget,' Justine said once more, for the last time, allowing him to maul her hand with gratitude for such a wonderful idea.  'Don't forget,' allowing her ringed fingers to lie in his, cool and unfeeling as a cow which allows itself to be milked.  'Only tell me all the interesting conversations you have, won't you?'  He could only mutter 'Darling, darling, darling,' as he kissed the ring with the ovarian passion of the sexually dispossessed.

      Almost at once, like the Gulf Stream braking up an iceberg with its warm currents, dispersing it, their party disintegrated as it reached the ballroom and merged with the crowd.  Abruptly, Athena was dragged screaming into the heart of the press by a giant domino who gobbled and roared incomprehensible blasphemies in his hood.  Nessim, Narouz, Pierre, they suddenly found themselves turned to ciphers, expelled into a formless world of adventitious meetings, mask to dark mask, like a new form of insect life.  Toto's chalk-mark gave him a few fugitive moments of identity as he was borne away like a cork on a stream, and Justine's ring as well (for which I myself was hunting all that evening in vain).

      But everything now settled into the mindless chaotic dance-figures of the black jazz supported only by the grinding drums and saxophones, the voices.  The spirits of the darkness had taken over, you'd think, disinheriting the daylight hearts and minds of the maskers, plunging them ever deeper into the loneliness of their own irrecoverable identities, setting free the polymorphous desires of the city.  The tide washed them up now onto the swampy littorals of their own personalities - symbols of Alexandria, a dead brackish lake surrounded by the silent, unjudging, wide-eyed desert which stretches away into Africa under a dead moon.

      Locked in our masks now we prowled about despairingly among the company, hunting from room to room, from floor to lighted floor of the great house, for an identifiable object to direct our love: a rose pinned to a sleeve, a ring, a scarf, a coloured bead.  Something, anything, to discover our lovers by.  The hoods and masks were like the outward symbols of our own secret minds as we walked about - as single-minded and as dispossessed as the desert fathers hunting for their God.  And slowly but with irresistible momentum the great carnival ball gathered pace around us.  Here and there, like patches of meaning in an obscure text, one touched upon a familiar identity: a bullfighter drinking whisky in a corridor greeted one in the lisping accents of Tony Umbada, or Pozzo di Borgo unmasked for an instant to identify himself to his trembling wife.  Outside in the darkness on the grass by the lily-pond sat Amaril, also trembling and waiting.  He did not dare to remain unmasked lest the sight of his face might disgust or disappoint her, should she return this year to the promised assignation.  If one falls in love with a mask when one is masked oneself ... which of you will first have the courage to raise it?  Perhaps such lovers would go through life together, remaining masked?  (Racing thoughts in Amaril's sentimental brain.... Love rejoices in self-torture.)

      An expressive washerwoman dressed in a familiar picture-hat and recognizable boots (Pombal, as ever was), had pinned a meagre-looking Roman centurion to a corner of the mantelpiece and was cursing him in a parrot-voice.  I caught the word 'salaud'.  The little figure of the Consul-General managed to mime his annoyance with choppy gestures and struggles, but it was all in vain, for Pombal held him fast in his great paws.  It was fascinating to watch.  The centurion's casque fell off, and pushing him to the bandstand Pombal began to beat his behind rhythmically upon the big drum and at the same time to kiss him passionately.  He was certainly getting his own back.  But as I watched this brief scene, the crowd closed down upon it in a whirl of streamers and confetti and obliterated it.  We were packed body to body, cowl to cowl, eye to eye.  The music drove us round and round the floor.  Still no Justine.

 

                                                                    Old Tiresias

                                                                    No-one half so breezy as,

                                                                    Half so free and easy as

                                                                    Old Tiresias.

 

      It must have been about two o'clock that the fire started in one of the chimneys on the first floor, though its results were not serious and it caused more delight than alarm by its appropriateness.  Servants scurried officiously everywhere; I caught a glimpse of Cervoni, running unmasked upstairs, and then a telephone rang.  There were pleasing clouds of smoke, suggesting whiffs of brimstone from the bottomless pit.  Then within minutes a fire-engine arrived with its siren pealing, and the hall was full of fancy-dress figures of pompiers with hatchets and buckets.  They were greeted with acclamation as they made their way up to the scene of the fireplace which they virtually demolished with their axes.  Others of the tribe had climbed on the roof and were throwing buckets of water down the chimney.  This had the effect of filling the first floor with a dense cloud of soot like a London fog.  The maskers crowded in shouting with delight, dancing like dervishes.  These are the sort of inadvertencies which make a party go.  I found myself shouting with them.  I suppose I must have been rather drunk by now.

      In the great tapestried hall the telephone rang and rang again, needling the uproar.  I saw a servant answer it, lay the receiver down, and quest about like a gun-dog until presently he returned with Nessim, smiling and unmasked, who spoke into it quickly and with an air of impatience.  Then he too put the receiver down and came to the edge of the dance-floor, staring about him keenly.  'Is anything wrong?' I asked, lifting my own hood as I joined him.  He smiled and shook his head.  'I can't see Justine anywhere.  Clea wants to speak to her.  Can you?'  Alas! I had been trying to pick up the distinguishing ring all evening without success.  We waited, watching the slow rotation of the dancers, keenly as fishermen waiting for a bite.  'No,' he said, and I echoed 'No.'  Pierre Balbz came up and joined us, lifting his cowl, and said 'A moment ago I was dancing with her.  She went out, perhaps.'

      Nessim returned to the telephone and I heard him say: 'She's here somewhere.  Yes, quite sure.  No.  Nothing has happened.  Pierre had the last dance with her.  Such a crowd.  She may be in the garden.  Any message?  Can I ask her to ring you?'  He put down the receiver and turned back to us.  'Anyway,' he said, 'we have a rendezvous in the hall unmasked at three.'

      And so the great ball rolled on around us, and the firemen who had done their duty now joined the throng of dancers.  I caught a glimpse of a large washerwoman being carried, apparently insensible, out into the conservatory by four demons with breasts amid great applause.  Pombal had evidently succumbed to his favourite brand of whisky once more.  He had lost his hat but had had the forethought to wear under it an immense wig of yellow hair.  It is doubtful whether anyone could have recognized him in such a rig.

      Punctually at three Justine appeared in the hall from the garden and unmasked herself:  Pierre and I had decided not to accept Nessim's offer of a lift home but to stay on and lend our energy to the ball which was beginning to flag now.  Little parties were meeting and leaving, cars were being rallied.  Nessim kissed her tenderly and said: 'Where's your ring?' a question which I myself had been burning to put to her, though I had not dared.  She smiled that innocent and captivating smile as she said: 'Toto pinched it from my finger a few minutes ago, during a dance.  Where is the little brute?  I want it back.'  We raked the floor for Toto, but there was no sign of him and at last Nessim, who was tired, decided to give him up for lost.  But he did not forget to give Justine Clea's message, and I saw my lover go obediently to the telephone and dial her friend's number.  She spoke quietly and with an air of mystification for a few moments, and I heard her say: 'Of course I'm all right,' before bidding Clea a belated goodnight.  Then they stepped down together into the waning moonlight arm in arm, and Pierre and I helped to tuck them into the car.  Selim, impassive and hawk-featured, sat at the wheel.  'Goodnight!' cried Justine, and her lips brushed my cheek.  She whispered 'Tomorrow', and the word sang on in my mind like the whistle of a bullet as we turned together into the lighted house.  Nessim's face had been full of a curious impish serenity as of someone resting after a great expenditure of energy.

      Someone had heard a ghost murmuring in the conservatory.  Much laughter.  'No, but I assure you,' squealed Athena.  'We were sitting on the sofa, Jacques and I, weren't we, Jacques?'  A masked figure appeared, blew a squeaker in her face and retired.  Something told me it was Toto.  I dragged his cowl back and up bobbed the features of Chloë Martinengo.  'But I assure you,' said Athena, 'it moaned a word - something like ...' she set her face in a grim scowl of concentration and, after a pause, sang out in a lullaby voice the expiring words 'Justice ... Justice.'  Everyone laughed heartily and several voices mimicked her: 'Justice' roared a domino rushing away up the stairs.  'Justice!'

      Alone once more, I found that my irresolution and despondency had turned to physical hunger, and I traversed the dance-floor cautiously in the direction of the supper-room from which I could hear the thirsty snap of champagne corks.  The ball itself was still in full swing, and dancers swaying like wet washing in a high wind, the saxophones wailing like a litter of pigs.  In an alcove Drusilla Banubula sat with her dress drawn up to her shapely knees, allowing a pair of contrite harlequins to bandage a sprained ankle.  She had fallen down or been knocked down, it would seem.  An African witchdoctor wearing a monocle lay fast asleep on the couch behind her.  In the second room a maudlin woman in evening dress was playing jazz on a grand piano and singing to herself while great tears coursed down her cheeks.  An old fat man with hairy legs hung over her, dressed as the Venus de Milo.  He was crying too.  His belly trembled.

      The supper-room, however, was comparatively quiet, and here I found Pursewarden, uncowled and apparently rather tipsy, talking to Mountolive as the latter walked with his curious gliding, limping walk round the table, loading a plate with slices of cold turkey and salad.  Pursewarden was inveighing somewhat incoherently against the Cervonis for serving Spumante instead of champagne.  'I should watch it,' he called out to me, 'there's a headache in every mouthful.'  But he had his glass refilled almost at once, holding it with exaggerated steadiness.  Mountolive turned a speculative and gentle eye upon me as I seized a plate, and then greeted me by name with evident relief.  'Ah, Darley,' he said, 'for a moment I thought you were one of my secretaries.  They've been following me around all evening.  Spoiling my fun.  Errol simply refuses to violate protocol and leave before his Chief of Mission; so I had to hide in the garden until they thought I had left, poor dears.  As a junior I have so often cursed my Minister for keeping me up on boring evenings that I made a vow never to make my juniors suffer in the same way if I should ever become Head of Mission.'  His light effortless conversation with its unaffectedness of delivery always made him seem immediately sympathetic, though I realized that his manner was a professional one, the bedside manner of the trained diplomat.  He had spent so many years in putting his inferiors at their ease, and in hiding his spirit's condescension, that he had at last achieved an air of utterly professional sincerity which while seeming true to nature could not, in reality, have been less false.  It had all the fidelity of great acting.  But it was annoying that I should always find myself liking him so much.  We circled the table slowly together, talking and filling our plates.

      'What did you see in the garden, David?' said Pursewarden in a teasing tone, and the Minister's eye rested speculatively on him for a minute, as if to warn him against saying something which would be indiscreet or out of place.  'I saw,' said Mountolive, smiling and reaching for a glass, 'I saw the amorous Amaril by the lake - talking to a woman in a domino.  Perhaps his dreams have come true?'  Amaril's passion was well-known to everyone.  'I do hope so.'

      'And what else?' said Pursewarden in a challenging, rather vulgar tone, as if he shared a private secret with him.  'What else, who else did you see, David?'  He was slightly tipsy and his voice, though friendly, had a bullying note.  Mountolive flushed and looked down at his plate.

      At this I left them and made my way back, equipped with loaded plate and glass.  I felt a certain scorn in my heart for Pursewarden, and a rush of sympathy for Mountolive at the thought of him being put out of countenance.  I wanted to be alone, to eat in silence and think about Justine.  My cargo of food was nearly upset by three heavily-rouged Graces, all of them men to judge by the deep voices, who were scuffling in the hall.  They were attacking each others' private parts with jocular growls, like dogs.  I had the sudden idea of going up to the library, which would surely be empty at this time.  I wondered if the new Cavafy manuscripts would be there, and whether the collection was unlocked, for Cervoni was a great collector of books.

      On the first floor, a fat man with spindly legs, dressed in the costume of Red Riding Hood, was hammering on a lavatory door; servants were sucking the soot from the carpets of the rooms with Hoovers and talking in undertones.  The library was on the floor above.  There was a noise in one of the bedrooms, and from the bathroom below I could hear someone being chromatically sick.  I reached the landing and pressed the airtight door with my foot, and it sucked open to admit me.  The long room with its gleaming shelves of books was empty save for a Mephistopheles sitting in an armchair by the fire with a book on his knees.  He took his spectacles off in order to identify me and I saw that it was Capodistria.  He could not have chosen a more suitable costume.  It suited his great ravening beak of a nose and those small, keen eyes, set so close together.  'Come in,' he cried.  'I was afraid it might be someone wanting to make love, in which case ... tourjours la politesse, I should have felt bound.... What are you eating?  The fire is lovely.  I was looking up a quotation which has been worrying me all evening.'

      I joined him and placed my loaded plate of an offering between us to be shared.  'I came to see the new Cavafy manuscript,' I said.

      'All locked up, the manuscripts,' he said.

      'Well.'

      The fire crackled brightly and the room was silent and welcoming with its lining of fine books.  I took off my cape and sat down after a preliminary quest along the walls, during which Da Capo finished copying something out on to a piece of paper.  'Curious thing about Mountolive's father,' he said absently.  'This huge eight-volume edition of Buddhist texts.  Did you know?'

      'I had heard,' I said vaguely.

      'The old man was a judge in India.  When he retired he stayed on there, is still there; foremost European scholar on Pali texts.  I must say... Mountolive hasn't seen him for years.  He dressed like a saddhu he says.  You English are eccentrics through and through.  Why shouldn't the old man work on the texts in Oxford, eh?'

      'Climate, perhaps?'

      'Perhaps,' he agreed.  'There.  That's what I was hunting for - I knew it was somewhere in the fourth volume.'  He banged his book shut.

      'What is it?'

      He held his paper out to the fire and read slowly with an air of puzzled pleasure the quotation he had copied out: 'The fruit of the tree of good and evil is itself but flesh; yes, and the apple itself is but an apple of the dust.'

      'That's not Buddhist, surely,' I said.

      'No, it's Mountolive père himself, from the introduction.'

      'I think that....'

      But now there came a confused screaming from somewhere near at hand, and Capodistria sighed.  'I don't know why the devil I take part in this damned carnival year after year,' he said peevishly, draining his whisky.  'It is an unlucky time astrologically.  For me, I mean.  And every year there are ugly accidents.  It makes one uneasy.  Two years ago Arnelh was found hanging in the musicians' gallery at the Fontanas' house.  Funny eh?  Damned inconsiderate if he did it himself.  And then Martin Fery fought that duel with Jacomo Forte.... It brings out the devil.  That is why I am dressed as the devil.  I hang about waiting for people to come and sell me their souls.  Aha!'  He sniffed and rubbed his hands with a parchment sound and gave his little dry cachinnation.  And then, standing up and finishing the last slice of turkey, 'God, have you seen the time?  I must be going home.  Beelzebub's bedtime.'

      'So should I,' I said, disappointed that I could not get a look at the handwriting of the old poet.  'So should I.'

      'Can I lift you?' he said, as the sucking door expelled us once more into the trampled musical air of the landing.  'Useless to expect to say goodbye to our hosts.  Cervoni is probably in bed by now.'

      We went down slowly chatting into the great hall where the music rolled on in an unbroken stream of syncopated sound.  Da Capo had adjusted his mask now and looked like some weird bird-like demon.  We stood for a moment watching the dancers, and then yawning he said: 'Well, this is where to quote Cavafy the God abandons Antony.  Good night.  I can't stay awake any longer, though I am afraid the evening will be full of surprises yet.  It always is.'

      Nor was he to be proved wrong.  I hovered for a while, watching the dance, and then walked down the stairs into the dark coolness of the night.  There were a few limousines and sleepy servants waiting by the gates, but the streets had begun to empty any my own footfalls sounded harsh and exotic as they smacked up from the pavements.  At the corner of Fuad there were a couple of European whores leaning dispiritedly against a wall and smoking.  They called once hoarsely after me.  They wore magnolia blossoms in their hair.

      Yawning, I passed the Etoile to see if perhaps Melissa was still working, but the place was empty except for a drunk family which had refused to go home despite the fact that Zoltan had stacked up the chairs and tables around them on the dance-floor.  'She went off early,' the little man explained.  'Band gone.  Girls gone.  Everyone gone.  Only these canaille from Assuan.  His brother is a policeman; we dare not close.'  A fat man began to belly-dance with sugary movements of the hips and pelvis and the company began to mark the time.  I left and walked past Melissa's shabby lodgings in the vague hope that she might still be awake.  I felt I wanted to talk to someone; no, I wanted to borrow a cigarette.  That was all.  Afterwards would come the desire to sleep with her, to hold that slender cherished body in my arms, inhaling its sour flavours of alcohol and tobacco-smoke, thinking all the time of Justine.  But her window was dark; either she was asleep or was not yet home.  Zoltan had said that she left with a party of businessmen disguised as admirals.  'Des petits commerçants quelconques,' he had added contemptuously, and then turned at once apologetic.

      No, it was to be an empty night, with the frail subfuse moonlight glancing along the waves of the outer harbour, the sea licking and relicking the piers, the coastline thinning away in whiteness, glittering away into the greyness like mica.  I stood for a while on the Corniche snapping a paper streamer in my fingers, bit by bit, each fragment breaking off with a hard dry finality, like a human relationship.  Then I turned sleepily home, repeating in my mind the words of Da Capo: 'The evening will be full of surprises.'

      Indeed, they were already beginning in the house which I had just left, though of course I was not to learn about them until the following day.  And yet, surprises though they were, their reception was perfectly in keeping with the city - a city of resignation so deep as almost to be Moslem.  For nobody in Alexandria can ever be shocked deeply; among us tragedy exists only to flavour conversation.  Death and life are both simply the hazards of a chance which cannot be averted, and merit only smiles and conversations made more animated by the consciousness of their intrusion.  No sooner do you tell an Alexandrian a piece of bad news than the words come out of his mouth: 'I knew.  Something like this was bound to happen.  It always does.'  This, then, is what happened.

      In the conservatory of the Cervoni house there were several old-fashioned chaise-longues on which a mountain of overcoats and evening-wraps had been piled; as the dancers began to go home there came the usual shedding of dominoes and the hunt for furs and capes.  I think it was Pierre who must have made the discovery while hunting in this great tumulus of coats for the velvet smoking-jacket which he had shed earlier in the evening.  At any rate, I myself had already left and started to walk home by this time.

      Toto de Brunel was discovered, still warm in his velvet domino, with his paws raised like two neat little cutlets, in the attitude of a dog which had rolled over to have its belly scratched.  He was buried deep in the drift of coats.  One hand had half-tried to move towards the fatal temple but the impulse had been cut off at source before the action was complete, and it had stayed there raised a little higher than the other, as if wielding an invisible baton.  The hatpin from Pombal's picture hat had been driven sideways into his head with terrific force, pinning him like a moth into his velvet headpiece.  Athena had been making love to Jacques while she was literally lying upon his body - a fact which would under normal circumstances had delighted him thoroughly.  But he was dead, le pauvre Toto, and what is more he was still wearing the ring of my lover.  "Justice!"

      'Of course, something like this happens every year.'

      'Of course.'  I was still dazed.

      'But Toto - that is rather unexpected, really.'

      Balthazar rang me up about eleven o'clock the next morning to tell me the whole story.  In my stupefied and sleepy condition it sounded not merely improbable, but utterly incomprehensible.  'There will be the procès-verbal - that's why I'm ringing.  Nimrod is making it as easy as he can.  One dinner-party witness only - Justine thought perhaps you if you don't mind?  Good.  Of course.  No, I was got out of bed at a quarter to four by the Cervonis.  They were in rather a state about it.  I went along to ... do the needful.  I'm afraid they can't quite sort it all out as yet.  The pin belonged to the hat - yes, your friend Pombal ... diplomatic immunity, naturally.  Nevertheless, he was very drunk too.... Of course it is inconceivable that he did it, but you know what the Police are like.  Is he up yet?'  I had not dared to try and wake him at such an early hour, and I said so.  'Well, anyway,' said Balthazar, 'his death has fluttered a lot of dovecotes, not least at the French Legation.'

      'But he was wearing Justine's ring,' I said thickly, and all the premonitions of the last few months gathered in force at my elbow, crowding in upon me.  I felt quite ill and feverish and had to lean for a moment against the wall by the telephone.  Balthazar's measured tone and cheerful voice sounded to me like an obscenity.  There was a long silence.  'Yes, I know about the ring,' he said, and added with a quiet chuckle, 'but that too is hard to think of as a possible reason.  Toto was also the lover of the jealous Amar, you know.  Any number of reasons....'

      'Balthazar,' I said, and my voice broke.

      'I'll ring you if there's anything else.  The procès is at seven down at Nimrod's office.  See you there, eh?'

      'Very well.'

      I put down the phone and burst like a bomb into Pombal's bedroom.  The curtains were still drawn and the bed was in a terrible mess, suggesting a recent occupancy, but there was no other sign of him.  His boots and various items from the washerwoman's fancy dress lay about the room in various places, enabling me to discern that he had in fact got home the night before.  Actually his wig lay on the landing outside the front door: I know this because much later, towards midday, I heard his heavy step climbing the stairs and he entered the flat holding it in his hand.

      'I am quite finished,' he said briefly, at once.  'Finished, mon ami.'  He looked more plethoric than ever as he made for his gout chair as if anticipating a sudden attack of his special and private malady.  'Finished,' he repeated, sinking into it with a sigh and distending.  I was confused and bewildered, standing there in my pyjamas.  Pombal sighed heavily.

      'My Chancery has discovered everything,' he said grimly, setting his jaw.  'I first behaved very badly ... yes ... the Consul General is having a nervous breakdown today....' And then all of a sudden real tears of mixed rage, confusion and hysteria sprang up in his eyes.  'Do you know what?' he sneezed.  'The Deuxième think I went specially to the ball to stick a pin in de Brunel, the best and most trusted agent we have ever had here!'

      He burst out sobbing like a donkey now, and in some fantastic way his tears kept running into laughter; he mopped his streaming eyes and panted as he sobbed and laughed at one and the same time.  Then, still blown up by these overmastering paroxysms, he rolled out of his chair like a hedgehog on the carpet and lay there for a while still shaking; and then began to roll slowly to the wainscot where, shaken still with tears and laughter, he began to bang his head rhythmically against the wall, shouting at every bang the pregnant and magnificent word - the summa of all despair: 'Merde.  Merde.  Merde.  Merde.  Merde.'

      'Pombal,' I said weakly, 'for God's sake!'

      'Go away,' he cried from the floor.  'I shall never stop unless you go away.  Please go away.'  And so taking pity on him I left the room and ran myself a cold bath in which I lay until I heard him helping himself to bread and butter from the larder.  He came to the bathroom door and tapped.  'Are you there?' he said.  'Yes.'  'Then forget every word I said,' he shouted through the panel.  'Please, eh?'

      'I have forgotten already.'

      'Good.  Thank you, mon ami.'

      And I heard his heavy footfalls retreating in the direction of his room.  We lay in bed until lunchtime that day, both of us, silent.  At one-thirty, Hamid arrived and set out a lunch which neither of us had the appetite to eat.  In the middle of it, the telephone rang and I went to answer it.  It was Justine.  She must have assumed that I had heard about Toto de Brunel, for she made no direct mention of the business.  'I want,' she said, 'my dreadful ring back.  Balthazar has reclaimed it from the Police.  The one Toto took, yes.  But apparently someone has to identify and sign for it.  At the procès.  A thousand thanks for offering to go.  As you can imagine, Nessim and I ... it's a question of witnessing only.  And then perhaps, my darling, we could meet and you could give it back to me.  Nessim has to fly to Cairo this afternoon on business.  Shall we say in the garden of the Aurore at nine?  That will give you time.  I'll wait in the car.  So much want to speak to you.  Yes.  I must go now.  Thank you again.  Thank you.'

      We sat once more to our meal, fellow bondsmen, heavy with a sense of guilt and exhaustion.  Hamid waited upon us with solicitude and in complete silence.  Did he know what was preoccupying us both?  It was impossible to read anything on those gentle pock-marked features, in that squinting single eye.

 

*    *    *    *    *

 

XI

 

It was already dark when I dismissed my taxi at Mohammed Ali Square and set out to walk to the sub-department of the Prefecture where Nimrod's office was.  I was still dazed by the turn events had taken, and weighed down by the dispiriting possibilities they had raised in my mind - the warnings and threatenings of the last few months during which I had lived only for one person - Justine.  I burned with impatience to see her again.

      The shops were already lit up and the money-changers' counters were crowded with French sailors turning their francs into food and wine, silks, women, boys or opium - every kind of understandable forgetfulness.  Nimrod's office was at the back of a grey old-fashioned building set back at an angle to the road.  It seemed deserted now, full of empty corridors and open offices.  All the clerks had gone off duty at six.  My lagging footfalls echoed past the empty porter's lodge and the open doors.  It seemed strange to walk about so freely in a Police building unchallenged.  At the end of the third long corridor I came to Nimrod's own door and knocked.  There were voices inside.  His office was a large, indeed rather grandiose room befitting his rank, whose windows gave out on to a bare courtyard where some chickens clucked and picked all day in the dried mud floor.  A single tattered palm stood in the middle offering some summer shade.

      There was no sign from within the room so I opened the door and stepped in - only to stop short; for the brilliant light and darkness suggested that a cinema-show was taking place.  But it was only the huge epidiascope which threw upon the farther wall the blazing and magnified images of the photographs which Nimrod himself was feeding into it one by one from an envelope.  Dazzled, I stepped forward and identified Balthazar and Keats in that phosphorescent penumbra around the machine, their profiles magnetically lighted by the powerful bulb.

      'Good,' said Nimrod, half-turning, and 'sit you down,' as he abstractedly pushed out a chair for me.  Keats smiled at me, full of a mysterious self-satisfaction and excitement.  The photographs which they were studying with such care were his own flashlight pictures of the Cervoni ball.  At such magnification they looked like grotesque frescoes materializing and vanishing again upon the white wall.  'See if you can help on identification,' said Nimrod, and I sat down and obediently turned my face to the blaze in which sprawled the silhouettes of a dozen demented monks dancing together.  'Now that one,' said Keats.  The whole light of the magnesium had set fire to the outlines of the robed figures.

      Blown up to such enormous size the pictures suggested a new art-form, more macabre than anything a Goya could imagine.  This was a new iconography - painted in smoke and lightning flashes.  Nimrod changed them slowly, dwelling upon each one.  'No comment?' he would ask before passing another bloated facsimile of real life before our eyes.  'No comment?'

      For identification purposes they were quite useless.  There were eight in all - each a fearful simulacrum of a death-feast celebrated by satyr-monks in some medieval crypt, each imagined by Sade!  'There's the one with the ring,' said Balthazar as the fifth picture came up and hovered before us on the wall.  A group of hooded figures, frenziedly swaying with linked arms, wallowed before us, expressionless as cuttlefish, or those other grotesque monsters one sometimes sees lurking in the glooms of aquaria.  Their eyes were slits devoid of meaning, their gaiety a travesty of everything human.  So this is how Inquisitors behave when they are off duty! Keats sighed in despair.  One of the figures had a hand upon another's black-robed arm.  The hand bore a just recognizable dash of white to indicate Justine's unlucky ring.  Nimrod described it all carefully to himself with the air of a man reading a gauge.  'Five maskers ... somewhere near the buffet, you can see the corner.... But the hand.  Is it de Brunel's?  What do you think?'  I stared at it.  'I think it must be,' I said.  'Justine wears the ring on another finger.'

      Nimrod said 'Hah' triumphantly and added: 'A good point there.'  Yes, but who were the other figures, snatched thus fortuitously out of nothingness by the flashbulb?  We stared at them and they stared expressionlessly back at us through their velvet slits like snipers.

      'No good,' said Balthazar at last with a sigh, and Nimrod switched off the humming machine.  After an instant's darkness the ordinary electric light came up in the room.  His desk was stacked up with typed papers for signature - the procès-verbal I had no doubt.  On a square of grey silk lay several objects with a direct relationship to our brimming thoughts - the great hatpin with its ugly blue stone head, and the eburnine ring of my lover which I could not see even now without a pang.

      'Sign up,' said Nimrod, indicating the paper, 'when you've read your copy, will you?'  He coughed behind his hand and added in a lower tone: 'And you can take the ring.'

      Balthazar handed it to me.  It felt cold, and it was faintly dusted with fingerprint powder.  I cleaned it on my tie and put it in my fob-pocket.  'Thank you,' I said, and took a seat at the desk to read through the Police formula, while the others lit cigarettes and talked in low voices.  Beside the typewritten papers lay another, written in the nervous shallow hand of General Cervoni.  It was the invitation list to the carnival ball, still echoing with the majestic poetry of the names which had come to mean so much to me, the names of the Alexandrians.  Listen:

      Pia dei Tolomei, Benedict Dangeau, Dante Borromeo, Colonel Neguib, Toto de Brunel, Wilmot Pierrefeu, Mahmet Adm, Pozzo di Borgo, Ahmed Hassan Pacha, Delphine de Francueil, Djamboulat Bey, Athena Trasha, Haddad Fahmy Amin, Gaston Phipps, Pierre Balbz, Jacques de Guéry, Count Banubula, Onouphrios Papas, Dmitri Randidi, Paul Capodistria, Claude Amaril, Nessim Hosnani, Tony Umbada, Baldassaro Trivizani, Gilda Ambron....

      I murmured the names as I read through the list, mentally adding the word 'murderer' after each, simply to see whether it sounded appropriate.  Only when I reached the name of Nessim did I pause and raise my eyes to the dark wall - to throw his mental image there and study it as we had studied the pictures.  I still saw the expression on his face as I had helped to tuck him into the great car - an expression of curious impish serenity, as of someone resting after a great expenditure of energy.

 

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