John Fowles - The Magus

A low couch, covered by a huge golden-tawny rug, perhaps an Afghan carpet. On it, superbly white and completely naked, was Lily. She was 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 color of cornelians, as if they alone in all that cream-white 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 white 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 gleaming body 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.

I had assumed it was Lily, but I could not see the scar, and I began to waver. It was Lily; it was Rose; then Lily again. 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 it was neither Lily nor Rose. 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 Récamier, to whoever had switched on the light and drawn open the curtain. A new figure appeared.

It was Joe.

He was in a tunic of indeterminate period, a semi-toga, 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 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 were silk. As slow as a connoisseur, sure of the white surrender. Then he calmly stood up and unbrooched 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. He was tender with her, she was tender with him, and 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, to accept this corrosively evil role. 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-colored 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.”

Lily. Or was it her sister? Had I ever known which was which? What they were, their identities, 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, their vanishing into the black pines. The next day’s innocent virgin on the beach. The black doll swung in my mind, the skull grinned malevolently. Artemis, Artemis, 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 went swiftly back to where he had come from. She lay for a moment as he had left her, crushed 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 rancor 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 lago 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 lago. Crucified by… the metamorphoses of Lily ran wildly through my brain, like maenads, hunting some blindness, some demon in me down.

Not a sixth act, but an act before the first. The seed. The seed of all betrayal.

And I comprehended. I suddenly knew her real name, behind the masks of Lily, of Julie, of Artemis, of the doctor, of Desdemona. 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.