The Magus, A Revised Version (10 page)

From the hills behind came the solitary voice of a girl. She must have been bringing down the goats, and she was singing wildly, at the limit of her uninhibited voice; without any recognizable melody, in Turkish-Muslim intervals. It sounded disembodied, of place, not person. I remembered having heard a similar voice, perhaps this same girl
’
s, singing one day on the hill behind the school. It had drifted down into the classroom, and the boys had begun to giggle. But now it seemed intensely mysterious, welling out of a solitude and suffering that made mine trivial and absurd. I sat with the gun across my knees, unable to move while the sound floated down through the evening air. I don
’
t know how long she sang, but the sky darkened, the sea paled to a nacreous grey. Over the
moubtains
there were pinkish bars of high cloud in the still strong light from the set sun. All the land and the sea held light, as if light was warmth, and did not fade as soon as the source was removed. But the voice dwindled towards the village; then died into silence.

I raised the gun again until the barrel was pointing at me. The stick projected, waiting for my feet to jerk down. The air was very silent. Many miles away I heard the siren of the Athens boat, approaching the island. But it was like something outside a vacuum. Death was now.

I did nothing. I waited. The afterglow, the palest yellow, then a luminous pale-green, then a limpid stained-glass blue, held in the sky over the sea of mountains to the we
st. I waited, I waited, I heard
the siren closer, I waited for the will, the black moment, to come to raise my feet and kick down; and I could not. All the time I felt I was being watched, that I was not alone, that I was putting on an act for the benefit of someone, that this action could be done only if it was spontaneous, pure
–
and moral. Because more and more it crept through my mind with the chill spring night that I was trying to commit not a moral action, but a fundamentally aesthetic one; to do something that would end my life sensationally, significantly, consistently. It was a Mercutio death I was looking for, not a real one. A death to be remembered, not the true death of a true suicide, the death obliterate.

And the voice; the light; the sky.

It began to grow dark, the siren of the receding Athens boat moaned, and I still sat smoking, with the gun by my side. I re
-
evaluated myself. I saw that I was from now on, for ever, contemptible. I had been, and remained, intensely depressed, but I had also been, and always would be, intensely false; in existentialist terms, inauthentic. I knew I would never kill myself, I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.

I raised the gun and fired it blindly into the sky. The crash shook me. There was an echo, some falling twigs. Then the heavy well of silence.

‘
Did you kill anything?
’
asked the old man at the gate.
‘
One shot,
’
I said.
‘
I missed.
’

Years later I saw
the
gabbia
at Piacenza: a harsh black canary-cage strung high up the side of the towering campanile, in which prisoners were once left to starve to death and rot in full view of the town below. And looking up at it I remembered that winter in
Greece,
that
gabbia
I had constructed for myself out of light, solitude,
and self-delusions. To write p
oetry and to commit suicide, ap
parently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape. And my feelings, at the end of that wretched term, were those of a man who knows he is in a cage, exposed to the jeers of all his old ambitions until he dies.

But I went to Athens, to the address the village doctor gave me. I was given a Kahn test and Dr Patarescu
’
s diagnosis was confirmed. The ten days
’
treatment was very expensive; most of the drugs had been smuggled into Greece, or stolen, and I was at the receiving end of a Third Man network. The smooth young American-trained doctor told me not to worry; the prognosis was excellent. At the end of the Easter holidays, when I returned to the island, I found a card from Alison. It was a garishly coloured thing with a kangaroo on it balloon-saying
‘
Thought I
’
d forgot?
’
My twenty-sixth birthday had taken place while I was in Athens. The postmark was Amsterdam. There was no message. It was simply signed
‘
Alison
’
. I threw it into the wastepaper basket. But that evening, I took it out again.

To get through the anxious wait for the secondary stage not to develop, I began quietly to rape the island. I swam and swam, I walked and walked, I went out every day. The weather rapidly became hot, and during the heat of the afternoon the school slept. Then I used to take
off
into the pine-forest. I always went over the central crest to the south side of the island if I could, away from the village and the school. There, was absolute solitude: three hidden cottages at one small bay, a few tiny chapels lost among the green downward of pines and deserted except on their saints
’
days, and one almost invisible villa, which was in any case empty. The rest was sublimely peaceful, as potential as a clean canvas, a site for myths. It was as if the island was split into dark and light; so that the teaching timetable, which made it difficult to go far except at weekends or by getting up very early (school began at half past seven), became as irksome as a short tether.

I did not think about the future. In spite of what the doctor at the clinic had said I felt certain that the cure would fail. The pattern of destiny seemed clear: down and down, and down.

But then the mysteries began.

I
rrités de ce premier crime, les monstres ne s
’
en tinrent pas là; ils l
’
étendirent ensuite nue, à plat ventre sur une grande table, ils allumèrent des cierges, ils placèrent l
’
image de notre sauveur à sa tête et osèrent consommer sur les reins de cette malheureuse le plus redoutable de nos mystères
.

De Sade,
Les Infortunes de la Vertu

It was a Sunday in late May, blue as a bird
’
s wing. I climbed up the goat-paths to the island
’
s ridge-back, from where the green froth of the pine-tops rolled two miles down to the coast. The sea stretched like a silk carpet across to the shadowy wall of mountains on the mainland to the west, a wall that reverberated away south, fifty or sixty miles to the horizon, under the vast bell of the empyrean. It was an azure world, stupendously pure, and as always when I stood on the central ridge of the island and saw it before me, I forgot most of my troubles. I walked along the central ridge, westwards, between the two vast views north and south. Lizards flashed up the pine-trunks like living emerald necklaces. There was thyme and rosemary, and other herbs; bushes with flowers like dandelions dipped in sky, a wild, lambent blue.

After a while I came to a place where the ridge fell away south in a
small near-precipitous bluff. I always used to sit on the brink there, to smoke a cigarette and survey the immense expanse of sea and mountains. Almost as soon as I sat down, that Sunday, I saw that something in the view had changed. Below me, halfway along the south coast of the island, there was the bay with the three small cottages. From this bay the coast ran on westwards in a series of low headlands and hidden coves. Immediately to the west of the bay with the cottages the ground rose steeply into a little cliff that ran inland some hundreds of yards, a crumbled and creviced reddish wall; as if it was some fortification for the solitary villa that lay on the headland beyond. All I knew of this house was that it belonged to a presumably well-to-do Athenian, who used it only in high summer. Because of an intervening rise in the pine-forest, one could see no more than the flat roof of the place from the central ridge.

But now a thin wisp of pale smoke curled up from the roof. It was no longer deserted. My first feeling was one of resentment, a Crusoe-like resentment, since the solitude of the south side of the island must now be spoilt and
I
had come to feel possessive about it. It was my secret province and no one else
– I
permitted the poor
fishermen in the three cottages
–
no one else risen beyond peasant-hood had any right to it. For all that I was curious, and I chose a path that I knew led down to a cove the other side of Bourani, the name of the headland the villa stood on.

The sea and a strip of bleached stones finally shone through the pines. I came to the edge of them. It was a large open cove, a stretch of shingle, the sea as clear as glass, walled by two headlands. On the left and steeper, the eastward one, Bourani, lay the villa hidden in the trees, which grew more thickly there than anywhere else on the island. It was a beach I had been to before two or three times, and it gave, like many of the island beaches, the lovely illusion that one was the very first man that had ever stood on it, that had ever had eyes, that had ever existed, the very first man. There was no sign of anyone from the villa. I installed myself at the more open westward end
of the beach, I swam, I ate my lunch of bread, olives and
zouzoukakia,
fragrant cold meatballs, and I saw no one.

Some time in the early afternoon I walked down the burning shingle to the villa end of the cove. There was a minute whitewashed chapel set back among the trees. Through a crack in the door I saw an overturned chair, an empty candlestand, and a row of naively painted ikons on a small screen. A tarnished paper-gilt cross was pinned on the door. On the back of it someone had scrawled
Agios Demetrios
–
Saint James. I went back to the beach. It ended in a fall of rocks which mounted rather forbiddingly into dense scrub and trees. For the first time I noticed some barbed wire, twenty or thirty feet from the foot of this slope; the fence turned up into the trees, isolating the headland. An old woman could have got through the rusty strands without difficulty, but it was the first barbed wire I had seen on the island, and I didn
’
t like it. It insulted the solitude.

I was staring up at the hot, heavy slope of trees, when I had the sensation that I was not alone. I was being looked at. I searched the trees in front of me. There was nothing. I walked a little nearer the rocks above which the wire fence ran through the scrub.

A shock. Something gleamed behind the first rock. It was a blue rubber footfin. Just beyond it, partially in the thin clear shadow of another rock, was the other fin, and a towel. I looked round again, then moved the towel with my foot. A book had been left beneath. I recognized it at once by the cove
r design: one of the commonest
paperback anthologies of modern English verse, which I had myself in my room back at the school. It was so unexpected that I remained staring stupidly down with the idea that it was in fact my own copy, stolen.

It was not mine. The owner had not written his or her name in
side, but there were several little slips of plain white paper, neatly cut.
The first one I turned to marked a page where four lines had been underscored in red ink; from
‘
Little Gidding
’
.

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

The last three lines had an additional mark vertically beside them. I looked up to the dense bank of trees again before I turned to the next little slip of paper. That, and all the other slips, were at pages where there were images or references concerning islands or the sea. There must have been about a dozen of them. Later, that night, I rediscovered a few passages in my own copy.

Each in his little bed conceived of islands…

Where love was innocent, being far from cities.

Those two lines from Auden had been marked, and the two intervening ones not. There were several, also discontinuous, from Ezra Pound.

Come, or the stellar tide will slip away.

Eastward avoid the hour of its decline,

Now! for the needle trembles in my soul! …

Mock not the flood of stars, the thing
’
s to be.

And this:

Who even dead, yet hath his mind entire!

This sound came in the dark

First must thou go the road

to hell

And to the bower of Ceres
’
daughter Proserpine,

Through overhanging dark, to see Tiresias,

Eyeless that was, a shade, that is in hell

So full of knowing that the beefy men know less than he,

Ere thou come to thy road
’
s end.

Knowledge the shade of a shade,

Yet must thou sail after knowledge

Knowing less than drugged beasts.