John Fowles - The Magus

And my freedom too was in not striking, whatever the cost. Whatever they thought of me; even though it would seem, as they had foreseen, that I was forgiving them, that I was indoctrinated; their dupe. That eighty other parts of me must die.

All Conchis’s maneuverings had been to bring me to this; all the charades, the psychical, the theatrical, the sexual, the psychological; and I was standing as he had stood before the guerrilla, unable to beat his brains out; discovering that there are strange times for the calling in of old debts, and even stranger prices to pay.

I lowered the cat.

The group of eleven, standing by the wall; standing with the sedan half-hidden in their center, as if they were guarding it from me. I saw Rose, who had the grace not to meet my eyes. I realized that she was frightened; she for one had not been sure.

The white back.

I walked towards them, towards Conchis. I saw Anton, who was standing beside him, tilt forward infinitesimally. I knew he was getting onto the balls of his feet ready to spring. Joe was watching me like a hawk, too. I stood in front of Conchis and handed him the cat, handle first. He took it, but he never moved his eyes from mine. We stared at each other for a long moment; that same old stare, simianly observing.

He expected me to speak; to say the word. But I would not speak.

I looked round the faces of the group. I knew they were only actors and actresses but that even the best of their profession cannot in silence act certain human qualities, like intelligence, experience, intellectual honesty; and they had their share of that. Nor could they take part in such a scene without more inducement than money; however much money Conchis offered. I sensed a moment of comprehension between all of us, a strange sort of mutual respect; on their side perhaps no more than a relief that I was as they secretly believed me to be, behind all the mysteries and the humiliations; on my side, a dim conviction of having entered some deeper, wiser esoteric society than I could without danger speak in. As I stood there, close to their eleven silences, their faces without hostility yet without concession, faces dissociated from my anger, as close-remote and oblique as the faces in a Flemish Adoration, I felt myself almost physically dwindling; as one dwindles before certain works of art, certain truths, seeing one’s smallness, narrow-mindedness, insufficiency in their dimension and value.

I could see it in Conchis’s eyes; something besides eleutheria had been proved. And I was the only person there who did not know what it was. I looked for it in his eyes; but that was like looking into the darkest night. A hundred things trembled on my lips, in my mind; and died there.

No answer; no movement.

Abruptly I went back to the “throne.”

I watched the “students” go out, I watched Lily being unfastened. Rose helped her dress, and they rejoined the others. The frame was removed. Finally only the group of twelve remained. Once again, as drilled as a Sophoclean chorus, they bowed, then turned and walked out.

The men stood aside for the women to lead the way at the arch and Lily was the first to disappear. But when the last of the men had gone, she came back for a moment in the archway, staring at me as I stared at her, her face without expression, without gratitude, leaving a dozen reasons in the air as to why she might have given me this last glimpse; or herself this last glimpse of me.

I was alone with the same three guards who had brought me. They waited a minute, two minutes. Adam offered me a cigarette. I smoked, racked between an anger and a relief, between a feeling that I should have made some excoriating denunciation of them and and all their practices and a feeling that I had done the only thing that could leave me any dignity. The cigarette was almost finished when Adam looked at his watch, then at me.

“Now…”

He pointed at the handcuffs that were still dangling from the supports of the arrnrests.

“Look. Finished. No more of this.” I stood up, but my arms were caught at once. I took a deep breath. Adam shrugged.

“ Bitte .”

I let myself be handcuffed to the two men. Then he came with the gag. That was too much. I began to struggle, but they simply jerked me sharply back onto the throne; once again choiceless, I submitted. He slipped the gag over my head, this time without taping it. Then I was masked, and we set off. We walked through the archway, but outside we turned right, not left; we were not going back the way we came. Twenty or thirty paces, then down five steps and apparently into yet another large room or cistern.

I was forced backwards, there was a fiddling with the handcuffs. Then my left arm was abruptly raised, there was a click, and with an icy new apprehension I realized what they had done. I had been fastened to the flogging frame. I really began to struggle then. I kicked and kneed, I wrenched at the man to whose wrist I was still attached. They could have beaten me up at will. There were three of them and I couldn’t see and it was ridiculous. But they must have been under orders to do things as gently as possible. Eventually they forced my other arm up and linked it to the second ring. The mask was taken off.

It was a very long narrow room, another cistern, but lowervaulted; eighty feet long and about twenty wide. Halfway down was a white cinema screen, like the one that had been used at Bourani. Three-quarters way down, a pair of drawn black curtains stretched the width of the room. The obscure end wall was just visible over their tops. I was fixed to the frame, but frontways on, and it had been set against the wall. Just in front of me and slightly to my right was a small cinema projector with a reel of i6-mrn. film. What light there was came from through the doorway I could see to my left.

My trio of blackshirts wasted no time. They went to the projector, switched it on, checked that the film was correctly fed and then set it going. It began with the black wheel on white, as if it was a film company emblem. One of the men adjusted the lens focus a little. Adam came back and stood in front of me—out of reach of any kick I might attempt—and spoke.

“The disintoxication.”

I understood that I had been forced to “forgive” so that I could be moved on to this final humiliation; a metaphorical, if not a literal, flogging.

I had still not reached the bottom.

I was alone with the whirring projector and whatever lay beyond the curtains. The emblem faded and words appeared.

POLYMUS FILMSPRESENT

The screen went white for a moment. Then:

THE SHAMEFUL TRUTH

The black wheel. Then:

WITH

THE FABULOUS WHORE

IO

A blank.

WHO YOU WILL REMEMBER AS

ISIS

ASTARTE

KALI

A long blank.

AND AS THE CAPTIVATINGLILY MONTGOMERY

There was a brief shot of Lily kneeling behind a man. It had almost ended before I realized that the man was myself. Someone, Conchis, must have taken us with a telephoto lens, the day she recited “The frog he would a-wooing go"; she had even warned me he was using exactly such a camera.

AS THE UNFORGETTABLY DESIRABLE

JULIE HOLMES

Another brief shot: I was standing and kissing her in bright sunlight. The vegetable-garden terrace. She wore the white linen suit. It had been done on that last morning at Bourani, after the others had left.

AND AS THE LEARNED AND COURAGEOUS

VANESSA MAXWELL

This time it was a still. She was behind a desk, a laboratory desk covered with papers. A rack of test tubes. A microscope. Madame Curie.

AND NOW IN HER GREATEST ROLE AS

The wheel reappeared for a moment.

HERSELF!

Blank film.

Then a fade-in shot of Joe in his jackal mask running down the track towards the house at Bourani; a devil in sunlight; he ran right up into the camera lens, blacking it out.