by John Fowles
There was the most brutally pornographic shot yet, down-angled, of the naked girl lying on the bed. Once again it did not reveal her face, which was twisted back almost out of sight. It showed her waiting to receive the Negro, whose blurred dark back was close to the camera.
Meanwhile.
Suddenly the quality of the film changed. It was shot, very jerkily, by a different camera in different circumstances. Two people in a crowded restaurant. With an acute shock, a flush of bitter anger, I saw who it was: Alison and myself, that first evening, in the Piraeus. There was a flash of blank film, then another shot of us, which for a moment I could not place. Alison walking down a steep village street, myself a yard or two behind her. We both looked exhausted; and though it was too far to see the facial expressions, one could tell from that gap between us, the way we walked, that we were miserable. I recognized it: our return to Arachova. The cameraman must have been hidden in a cottage, shooting from behind a shutter perhaps, because a transverse black bar obscured the end of the shot. I remembered the wartime sequence of Wimmel. I also recognized the implications; that we had been followed, watched and filmed throughout. It would not have been possible on the bare upper slopes of Parnassus, but in the trees … I remembered the pool, the sun on my naked back and Alison beneath me. It was too horrible, too blasphemous, that that, of all moments, could have been public.
Stripped, flayed by the knowledge; and their always knowing.
Blank film again. Then another title.
The act of copulation.
But the film ran through a series of numbers and flashing white scratches: the end of the reel. There was a flipping sound from the projector. The screen stared white. Someone ran in through the door and switched the projector off. I gave a grunt of contempt; I had been waiting for that failure of nerve, of the courage of their pornography. But the man – I saw by the faint light through the door that it was Adam again – walked to the screen and lifted it aside. I was left alone once more. For thirty seconds or so the room remained in darkness. Then light came from behind the curtains.
Someone began to pull them, from behind, by cords, as they do for plays in parish halls. When they were about two-thirds open, they stopped; but long before that the parallel with parish halls had vanished. The light came from a shade hung from the ceiling. It let no light through, so that the illumination was thrown down in a soft, intimate cone on to what lay beneath.
A low couch, covered by a huge golden-tawny rug, perhaps an Afghan carpet. On it, completely naked, was Lily. I could not see the scar, but I knew it was her. The tan was not dark enough for her sister. Lying against a mound of pillows, deep gold, amber, rose, maroon, themselves piled against an ornate gilt and carved headboard, she was turned sideways towards me in a deliberate imitation of Goya’s Maja Desnuda. Her hands behind her head, her nakedness offered. Not flaunted, but offered, stated as a divine and immemorial fact. A bare armpit, as sexual as a loin. Nipples the colour of cornelians, as if they alone in all that honeyed skin had been, or could be, bitten and bruised. The tapering curves, thighs, ankles, small bare feet. And the level, unmoving eyes staring with a kind of arrogant calm into the shadows where I hung.
Beyond her, on the rear wall, had been painted an arcade of slender black arches. I thought at first that they were meant to represent Bourani; but they were too narrow, and had slender Moorish-ogive tops. Goya … the Alhambra? I realized the couch was not legless, but that the far end of the room was on a slightly lower level, rather like a Roman bath. The curtains had concealed further steps down.
The slender form lay in its greenish-tawny lake of light, without movement; and she stared at me as from a canvas. The tableau pose was held so long that I began to think this was the great finale; this living painting, this naked enigma, this forever unattainable.
Minutes passed. The lovely body lay in its mystery. I could just see the imperceptible swell of her breathing … or could I? For a few moments I was looking at a magnificently lifelike wax effigy.
But then she moved.
Her head turned in profile and her right arm reached out gracefully and invitingly, in the classical gesture of Recamier, to whoever had switched on the light and drawn open the curtains. A new figure appeared.
It was Joe.
He was in a cloak of indeterminate period, pure white, lined heavily with gold. He went and stood behind the couch. Rome? An empress and her slave? He stared at me, or towards me, for a moment, and I knew he could not be meant to be a slave. He was too majestic, too darkly noble. He possessed the room, the stage, the woman. He looked down at her and she looked up, a grave affection; the swan neck. He took her outstretched hand.
Suddenly I understood who they were; and who I was; how prepared, this moment. I too had a new role. I tried then desperately to get rid of the gag, by biting, by yawning, by rubbing my head against my arms. But it was too tight.
The Negro, the Moor, knelt beside her, kissed her shoulder. A slim white arm framed and imprisoned his dark head. A long moment. Then she sank back. He surveyed her, slowly ran a hand down from her neck to her waist. As if she was silk. Sure of her surrender. Then he calmly stood up and unbroached his toga at the shoulder.
I shut my eyes.
Nothing is true; everything is permitted.
Conchis: His part is not ended yet.
I opened my eyes again.
There was no perversion, no attempt to suggest that I was watching anything else but two people who were in love making love; as one might watch two boxers in a gymnasium or two acrobats on a stage. Not that there was anything acrobatic or violent about them. They behaved as if to show that the reality was the very antithesis of the absurd nastiness in the film.
For long moments I shut my eyes, refusing to watch. But then always I seemed forced, a voyeur in hell, to raise my head and look again. My arms began to go numb, an additional torture. The two figures on the lion-coloured bed, the luminously pale and the richly dark, embraced, re-embraced, oblivious of me, of all except their enactment.
What they did was in itself without obscenity, merely private, familiar; a biological ritual that takes place a hundred million times every night the world turns. But I tried to imagine what could make them bring themselves to do it in front of me; what incredible argument Conchis used; what they used to themselves. Lily now seemed to me as far ahead of me in time as she had at first started behind; somehow she had learnt to lie with her body as other people could lie only with their tongues. Perhaps she wanted some state of complete sexual emancipation, and the demonstration of it was more necessary to her as self-proof than its exhibition was to me as my already supererogatory ‘disintoxication’.
Everything I had ever thought to understand about woman receded, interwove, flowed into mystery, into distorting shadows and currents, like objects sinking away, away, down through shafted depths of water.
The black arch of his long back, his loins joined to hers. White separated knees. That terrible movement, total possession between those acquiescent knees. Something carried me back to that night incident when she played Artemis; to the strange whiteness of Apollo’s skin. The dull gold crown of leaves. An athletic body, living marble. And I knew then that Apollo and Anubis had been played by the same man. That night, when she had left … the next day’s innocent virgin on the beach. The chapel. The black doll swung in my mind, the skull grinned malevolently. Artemis, Astarte, eternal liar.
He silently celebrated his orgasm.
The two bodies lay absolutely still on the altar of the bed. His turned-away head was hidden by hers, and I could see her hands caressing his shoulders, his back. I tried to wrench my aching arms free of the frame, to overturn it. But it had been lashed to the wall, to special staples; and the rings were bolted through the wood.
After an unendurable pause he rose from the bed, knelt and kissed her shoulder, almost formally, and then, gathering his cloak, calmly quit the stage for the shadows. She lay for a moment as he had left her, c
rushed back among the cushions. But then she raised herself on her left elbow and lay posed as she had at the beginning. Her stare fixed me. Without rancour and without regret; without triumph and without evil; as Desdemona once looked back on Venice.
On the incomprehension, the baffled rage of Venice. I had taken myself to be in some way the traitor Iago punished, in an unwritten sixth act. Chained in hell. But I was also Venice; the state left behind; the thing journeyed from.
The curtains were pulled slowly to. I was left where I had started, in darkness. Even the light behind was extinguished. I had a vertiginous moment in which I doubted whether it had happened. An induced hallucination? Had the trial happened? Had anything ever happened? But the savage pain in my arms told me that everything had happened.
And then, out of that pain, the sheer physical torture, I began to understand. I was Iago; but I was also crucified. The crucified Iago. Crucified by … the metamorphoses of Lily ran wildly through my brain, like maenads, hunting some blindness, some demon in me down. I suddenly knew her real name, behind the masks. Why they had chosen the Othello situation. Why Iago. Plunging through that.
I knew her real name. I did not forgive, if anything I felt more rage. But I knew her real name.
A figure appeared in the door. It was Conchis. He came to where I hung from the frame, and stood in front of me. I closed my eyes. The pain in my arms drowned everything else.
I made a sort of groaning-growling noise through the gag. I did not know myself what it really meant to say: whether that I was in pain or that if I ever saw him again I would tear him limb from limb.
‘I come to tell you that you are now elect.’
I shook my head violently from side to side.
‘You have no choice.’
I still shook my head, but more wearily.
He stared at me, with those eyes that seemed older than one man’s lifetime, and a little gleam of sympathy came into his expression, as if after all he might have put too much pressure on a very thin lever.
‘Learn to smile, Nicholas. Learn to smile.’
It came to me that he meant something different by ‘smile’ than I did; that the irony, the humourlessness, the ruthlessness I had always noticed in his smiling was a quality he deliberately inserted; that for him the smile was something essentially cruel, because freedom is cruel, because the freedom that makes us at least partly responsible for what we are is cruel. So that the smile was not so much an attitude to be taken to life as the nature of the cruelty of life, a cruelty we cannot even choose to avoid, since it is human existence. He meant something far stranger by ‘Learn to smile’ than a Smilesian ‘Grin and bear it’. If anything, it meant ‘Learn to be cruel, learn to be dry, learn to survive.’
That we have no choice of play or role. It is always Othello. To be is, immutably, to be Iago.
He gave the smallest of bows, one full of irony, of the contempt implicit in incongruous courtesy, then went.
As soon as he had gone, Anton came in with Adam and the other blackshirts. They undid the handcuffs and got my arms down. Along black pole two of the blackshirts were carrying was unrolled and I saw a stretcher. They forced me to lie down on it and once again my wrists were handcuffed to the sides. I could neither fight them nor beg them to stop. So I lay passively, with my eyes shut, to avoid seeing them. I smelt ether, felt very faintly the jab of a needle; and this time I willed the oblivion to come fast.
63
I was staring at a ruined wall. There were a few last patches of plaster, but most of it was of rough stones. Many had fallen and lay among crumbling mortar against the foot of the wall. Then I heard, very faintly, the sound of goat-bells. For some time I lay there, still too drugged to make the effort of finding where the light I could see the wall by came from; and the sound of the bells, of wind, and of swifts screaming. I was conditioned to be a prisoner. Finally I moved my wrists. They were free. I turned and looked.
I could see chinks of light through the roof. There was a broken doorway fifteen feet away; outside, blinding sunlight. I was lying on an air-mattress with a rough brown blanket over me. I looked behind. There stood my suitcase, with a number of things on it: a Thermos, a brown-paper packet, cigarettes and matches, a black box like a jewellery case, an envelope.
I sat up and shook my head. Then I threw the blanket aside and went unevenly over the uneven floor to the door. I was at the top of a hill. Before me stretched a vast downward slope of ruins. Hundreds of stone houses, all ruined, most of them no more than grey heaps of rubble, decayed fragments of grey wall. Here and there were slightly less dilapidated dwellings; the remnants of second floors, windows that framed sky, black doorways. But what was so extraordinary was that this whole tilted city of the dead seemed to be floating in midair, a thousand feet above the sea that surrounded it. I looked at my watch. It was still going; just before five. I clambered on top of a wall and looked round. In the direction in which the late-afternoon sun lay I could see a mountainous mainland stretching far to the south and north. I seemed to be on top of some gigantic promontory, absolutely alone, the last man on earth, between sea and sky in some medieval Hiroshima. And for a moment I did not know if hours had passed, or whole civilizations.
A fierce wind blew out of the north.
I returned inside the room and carried the suitcase and other things out into the sunshine. First of all I looked at the envelope. It contained my passport, about ten pounds in Greek money, and a typewritten sheet of paper. Three sentences. ‘There is a boat to Phraxos at 11.30 tonight. You are in the Old City at Monemvasia. The way down is to the southeast.’ No date, no signature. I opened the Thermos: coffee. I poured myself a full capful and swallowed it; then another. The packet contained sandwiches. I began to eat, with the same feeling I had had that morning, of intense pleasure in the taste of coffee, the taste of bread, of cold lamb sprinkled with origan and lemon-juice.
But added to this now was a feeling, to which the great airy landscape contributed, of release, of having survived; a resilience. Above all there was the extraordinariness of the experience; its uniqueness conferred a uniqueness on me, and I had it like a great secret, a journey to Mars, a prize no one else had. Then too I seemed to see my own behaviour, I had woken up seeing it, in a better light; the trial and the disintoxication were evil fantasies sent to test my normality, and my normality had triumphed. They were the ones who had been finally humiliated – and I saw that perhaps that astounding last performance had been intended to be a mutual humiliation. While it happened it had seemed like a vicious twisting of the dagger in an already more than sufficient wound; but now I saw it might also be a kind of revenge given me for their spying, their voyeurism, on Alison and myself.
I had this: being obscurely victorious. Being free again, but in a new freedom … purged in some way.
As if they had miscalculated.
It grew, this feeling, it became a joy to touch the warm rock on which I sat, to hear the meltemi blowing, to smell the Greek air again, to be alone on this peculiar upland, this lost Gibraltar, a place I had even meant to visit one day. Analysis, revenge, recording: all that would come later, as the explanations at the school, the decision to remain or not for another year, would have to be made later. The all-important was that I had survived, I had come through.
Later I realized that there was something artificial, unnatural, in this joy, this glossing over all the indignities, the exploited death of Alison, the monstrous liberties taken with my liberty; and I suppose that it had all been induced under hypnosis by Conchis again. It would have been part of the comforts; like the coffee and the sandwiches.
I opened the black box. Inside, on a bed of green baize, lay a brand-new revolver, a Smith & Wesson. I picked it up and broke it. I looked at the bases of six bullets, little rounds of brass with lead-grey eyes. The invitation was clear. I shook one out. They were not blanks. I pointed the gun out to sea, to the north, and pulled the trigger. The crack made my ears ring and the huge bro
wn and white swifts that slit their way across the blue sky above my head jinked wildly.
Conchis’s last joke.
I climbed a hundred yards or so to the top of the hill. Not far to the north was a ruined curtain-wall, the last of some Venetian or Ottoman fortification. From it I could see ten or fifteen miles of coastline to the north. A long white beach, a village twelve miles away, one or two white scattered houses or chapels, and beyond them a massively rising mountain, which I knew must be Mount Parnon, visible on clear days from Bourani. Phraxos lay about thirty miles away over the sea to the northeast. I looked down. The plateau fell away in a sheer cliff seven or eight hundred feet down to a narrow strip of shingle; a jade-green ribbon where the angry sea touched land, and then white horses, deep blue. Standing on the old bastion, I fired the remaining five bullets out to sea. I aimed at nothing. It was a. feu de joie, a refusal to die. When the fifth crack had sounded, I took the gun by the butt and sent it whirling out into the sky. It paraboled, poised, then fell slowly, slowly, down through the abyss of air; and by lying flat at the very brink I even saw it crash among the rocks at the sea’s edge.
I set off. After a while I struck a better path, which twice passed doorways that led down into large rubble-choked cisterns. At the south side of the huge rock I saw, far below, an old walled town on a skirt of land that ran steeply from the cliff-bottom down to the sea. Many ruined houses, but also a few with roofs and eight, nine, ten, a covey of churches. The path wound through the ruins and then to a doorway. A long downward tunnel led to another doorway with a hurdle across it, which explained the absence of a goatherd. There was evidently only one way up or down, even for goats. I climbed over the hurdle and emerged into the sunlight. A path with a centuries-old paving of slabs of grey-black basalt graphed down the cliff, finally curving towards the red-ochre roofs of the walled town.
