John Fowles - The Magus

I set off down. After a while I struck a better path, which twice passed doorways that led 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 gray-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 .”

“ Pios 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 twentyfour 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, Passáva. 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 newspaperwrapped parcels were referable and locateable; 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 traveling 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.

De Deukans. Millet. Hoeing turnips.

Beside me was a family, a husband with his back turned, his head on a sack, two small boys sandwiched for warmth between him and his wife. A thin blanket lay over them. The wife had a white scarf tied in a medieval way, tight round her chin. Joseph and Mary; one of her hands rested on the shoulder of the child in front. I fumbled in my pockets; there was still seven or eight pounds left of the money that had been given me. I looked round, then swiftly stooped and put the little wad of notes in a fold of the blanket behind the woman’s head; then furtively left, as if I had done something shameful.

At a quarter to three I was silently climbing the dark stairs in the masters’ wing. My room was tidy, all in order. The only thing that had changed was that the pile of examination papers were no longer there. In their place were several letters.

The first one I opened I did because I couldn’t think who would be writing to me from Italy.

Monastery of Sacro Speco,

Near Subiaco

July 14th

DEAR MR. URFE,

Your letter has been forwarded to me. I at first decided not to reply to it, but on reflection I think it is fairer to you if I write to say that I am not prepared to discuss the matter that you wish me to discuss. My decision on this is final.

I should greatly appreciate it if you would not renew your request in any way.

Yours sincerely,

JOHN LEVERRIER

The writing was impeccably neat and legible, though rather crabbed into the center of the page; I saw a neat, crabbed man behind it. Presumably on some sort of retreat, one of those desiccated young Catholics that used to mince about Oxford when I was an undergraduate, twittering about Monsignor Knox and Farm Street. I damned him for being so useless.

The next letter was from London, from someone who purported to be a headmistress, on nicely authentic headed notepaper.

Miss Julie Holmes

Miss Holmes was with us only for one year, in which she taught the classics and also some English and Scripture to our lower forms. She promised to develop into a good teacher, was most reliable and conscientious and also popular with her pupils.

I understood that she was embarking upon a stage career, but I am very pleased to hear that she is returning to teaching.

I should add that she was a very successful producer of our annual play, and also took a leading part in our Young Christians school society.

I recommend Miss Holmes warmly.

Very funny.

Next I opened another envelope from London. Inside was my own letter to the Tavistock Repertory Company. Someone had done impatiently but exactly as I requested, and scrawled the name of June and Julie Holmes’s agent across the bottom of the page in blue pencil.

Then there was a letter from Australia. In it was a printed blackedged card with a blank space for the sender’s name to be written in; a rather pathetically childlike hand had done so.

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R.I.P.

Mrs. Mary Kelly

thanks you for your kind letter

of condolence in her recent tragic

bereavement.

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