The Magus, A Revised Version (96 page)

‘
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.

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: c
off
ee. 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 c
off
ee, 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 indi
gnities, 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 c
off
ee 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 brown 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 th
e 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.

I picked my way down through alleys between whitewashed houses. An old peasant-woman stood in her doorway with a bowl of vegetable parings she had been emptying for her chickens. I must have looked very strange, carrying a suitcase, unshaven, foreign.

‘
Kal
’
espera.
’

‘
Pois eisai
?’
she wanted to know.
‘
Pou pas
?’
The old Homeric questions of the Greek peasant: Who art thou? Where goest thou?

I said I was English, a member of the company who had been making the film,
epano.

‘
What film up there?
’

I waved, said it didn
’
t matter, and ignoring her indignant queries, I came at last to a forlorn little main street, not six feet wide, the houses crammed along it, mostly shuttered, or empty; but over one I saw a sign and went in. An elderly man with a moustache, the keeper of the wineshop, came out of a dim corner.

Over the blue iron mug of retsina and the olives we shared I discovered all there was to discover. First of all, I had missed a day. The trial had not been that morning, but the day before; it was Monday, not Sunday. I had been drugged again for over twenty-four hours; and I wondered what else. What probing into the deepest recesses of my mind. No film company had been in Monemvasia; no large group of tourists; no foreigners since ten days ago … a French professor and his wife. What did the professor look like? A very fat man, he spoke no Greek … No, he had heard of no one going up there yesterday or today. Alas, no one came to see Monemvasia. Were there large cisterns with paintings on the walls up there? No, nothing like that. It was all ruins. Later, when I walked out of the old town gate and under the cliffs I saw two or three crumbling jetties where a boat could have slipped in and unloaded three or four men with a stretcher. They need not have passed the handful of houses that were still inhabited in the village; and they would have come by night.

There were old castles all over the Peloponnesus: Korone, Methone, Pylos, Koryphasion, Passava. They all had huge cisterns; could all be reached in a day from Monemvasia.

I went over the causeway through the gusty wind to the little mainland hamlet, which was where the steamer called. I had a bad meal in a taverna there, and a shave in the kitchen
–
yes, I was a tourist
–
and questioned the cook-waiter. He knew no more than the other man.

Pitching and rolling, the little steamer, made late by the
meltemi,
came at midnight; like a deep-sea monster, festooned with glaucous strings of pearly light. I and two other passengers were rowed out to her. I sat for a couple of hours in the deserted saloon, fighting
off
seasickness and the persistent attempts to start a conversation made by an Athenian greengrocer who had been to Monemvasia to buy tomatoes. He grumbled on and on about prices. Always in Greece conversation turns to money;
not
politics, or politics only because it is connected with money. In the end the seasickness wore
off
and I came to like the greengrocer. He and his mound of newspaper-wrapped parcels were referable and locatable; totally of the world into which I had returned; though for days I was to stare
suspiciously
at every stranger who crossed my path.

When we came near the island I went out on deck. The black whale loomed out of the windy darkness. I could make out the cape of Bourani, though the house was invisible, and of course there were no lights. On the foredeck, where I was standing, there were a dozen or so slumped figures, poor peasants travelling steerage. The mystery of other human lives: I wondered how much Conchis
’
s masque had cost; fifty times more, probably, than one of these men earned in a year
’
s hard work. So had cost their lifetime.