The Book of Explanations by López Mills Tedi;Myers Robin;

Author:López Mills, Tedi;Myers, Robin; [Mills, Tedi Lopez]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing

3

My third (or, to be more precise, half of my third) fundamental book was Lawrence Durrell’s Justine, the first volume of The Alexandria Quartet. A novel of names, not plots. A novel of characters: Justine (“arrow in darkness”), Nessim (“smooth gloves, face frosted glass”), Purswarden, Scobie (“piracy”), Balthazar (“fables, work, unknowing”), Clea (“still waters of pain”), Mountolive, Pombal, Melissa (“patron of sorrow”). All are extraordinarily intelligent, cultured, and refined; all smoke countless cigarettes and drink for hours without passing out; all are hurt or will be hurt; all are mysterious and have lived motley, complex lives that prompt them to utter sentences marked by both bitterness and wisdom; all flutter like blind pigeons around Justine. And I imitated them.

At sixteen, I found her irresistible: a beautiful, powerful woman, enigmatic and promiscuous and pure and totally honest in her cruelty and deceit. She’d make love with everyone, and afterward, sitting on the edge of the bed with a cigarette between her lips or fingers, she’d whisper precepts about eroticism, the gods, the city of Alexandria, the Greeks, and the urgent need to be alone. A bedroom utopia. That’s what the shadowy part of my future looked like to me. Justine was the precursor to La Maga in Cortázar’s Hopscotch, but without the latter’s spontaneity or magic spell of coincidence. She just had the moral acrobatics that let her conceal the repercussions of her actions and dupe her companions. I longed for that freedom as I read. To fall in love with Justine was to transcend middling commitments. It was total submission or nothing, although she continued to barter with her presence. My dream was to become the pursued and not the pursuer, like Justine. How could I achieve her haughty arrogance? Justine doesn’t care if she loses what she has, doesn’t fret about being betrayed, because her interpretation of the facts will always absolve her of participation in the first place. She moves faster even than her own experience. Or she comes back from it. It doesn’t matter, because she never succumbs to the vulgarity of examining her own conscience. She’s above all that, and those of us who adore her can only watch as she drifts away. Smoking, flying …

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