We spoke in French, with each kiss a painful sunrise. Yet this was all just an overture to our friendship disintegrating into a ravenous sexuality. That Nessim had her watched, I for a long time doubted. She had brought me back to meet her husband, Nessim, but here I must play with narrative structure for we talked not of Alexandria but of Plotinus and she urged me to meet Balthazar to discuss Gnosticism and to consider the work of a demiurge. She had approached me with the authority of a Lesbian, quizzing me on the antinomian nature of irony. "The city gives us no choice," she replied in all seriousness. "It can come to nothing, this passion between a poor schoolteacher and a married society beauty," I said. Of Justine? She was exigent, yet we shared a flirtation so profound it went beyond sexual attraction. But this was Alexandria, where everything was over-analysed under the sun's burning zenith and nothing really happened. For a week, her former lover, a bestial furrier, stalked the streets, intending to shoot me. This was the unpromising material on which Melissa poured her shimmering nectar. I had lost the will to live, gazing in a desultory, yet artistically languid, manner into my vacant subconscious and whiling away the taedium vitae with stray girls.
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