John Fowles - The Magus

And I only had to wait. They would bring her to me now.

I went down to a noon breakfast; and the first thing I discovered was that I did not have to wait. For there was another letter by hand for me. This time it contained just one word: London . I remembered that order in the Earth: Termination by July for all except nucleus . Nucleus, Ashtaroth the Unseen, was Alison.

I went to the travel agency and got a seat on the evening plane; and seeing a map of Italy on the wall, as I stood waiting for the ticket to be made out, I discovered where Subiaco was; and decided that the marionette would make the manipulators of strings wait a day, for a change.

When I came out I went into the biggest bookshop in Athens, on the corner of Stadiou, and asked for a book on the identification of flowers. My belated attempt at resuscitation had not been successful, and I had had to throw the buttonhole away. The assistant had nothing in English, but there was a good French flora, she said, which gave the names in several languages. I pretended to be impressed by the pictures, then turned to the index; to Alyssum, p. 69.

And there it was, facing page 69: thin green leaves, small white flowers, Alysson maritime … par fum de miel … from the Greek a (without) and lyssa (madness). Called this in Italian, this in German.

In English: Sweet Alison .

Rome.

In my mind Greece lay weeks, not the real hours, behind. The sun shone as certainly, the people were far more elegant, the architecture and the art much richer, but it was as if the Italians, like their Roman ancestors, wore a great mask of luxury, a cosmetic of the overindulged senses, between the light, the truth, and their real selves. I couldn’t stand the loss of the beautiful nakedness, the humanity of Greece, and so I couldn’t stand the sight of the opulent, animal Romans; as one sometimes cannot stand one’s own face in a mirror.

Early the morning after my arrival I caught a local train out towards Tivoli and the Alban hills. After a long bus ride I had lunch at Subiaco and then walked up a road above a green chasm. A lane branched off into a deserted glen. I could hear the sound of running water far below, the singing of birds. The road came to an end, and a path led up through a cool grove of ilex, and then tapered out into a narrow flight of steps that twisted up around a wall of rock. The monastery came into sight, clinging like an Orthodox Greek monastery, like a martin’s nest, to the cliff. A Gothic loggia looked out prettily over the green ravine, over a little apron of cultivated terraces falling below. Fine frescoes on the inner wall; coolness, silence.

There was an old monk in a black habit sitting behind the door through to an inner gallery. I asked if I could see John Leverrier. I said, an Englishman, on a retreat. Luckily I had his letter ready to show. The old man carefully deciphered the signature, then nodded and silently disappeared down into some lower level of the monastery. I went on into a hall. A series of macabre murals: death pricking a young falconer with his longsword; a medieval strip-cartoon of a girl, first titivating herself in front of a glass, then fresh in her coffin, then with the bones beginning to erupt through the skin, then as a skeleton. There was the sound of someone laughing, an old monk with an amused face scolding a younger one in French as they passed through the hall behind me. Oh, si tu penses que le football est un digne su jet de meditation …

Then another monk appeared; and I knew, with an icy shock, that this was Leverrier.

He was tall, very close-cut hair, with a thin-checked brown face, and glasses with “standard” National Health frames; unmistakably English. He made a little gesture, asking if it was I who had asked for him.

“I’m Nicholas Urfe. From Phraxos.”

He managed to look amazed, shy, and annoyed, all at the same time. After a long moment’s hesitation, he held out his hand. It seemed dry and cold; mine was stickily hot from the walk. He was nearly four inches taller than myself, and as many years older, and he spoke with a trace of the incisiveness that young dons sometimes affect.

“You’ve come all this way?”

“It was easy to stop off at Rome.”

“I thought I’d made it clear that—”

“Yes you did, but…”

We both smiled bleakly at the broken-ended sentences. He looked me in the eyes, affirming decision.

“I’m afraid your visit must still be considered in vain.”

“I honestly had no idea that you were…” I waved vaguely at his habit. “I thought you signed your letters…”

“Yours in Christ?” He smiled thinly. “I am afraid that even here we are susceptible to the forces of antipretention.”

He looked down, and we stood awkwardly. He came, as if impatient with our awkwardness, to a kinder decision; some mollification.

“Well. Now you are here—let me show you round.”

I wanted to say that I hadn’t come as a tourist, but he was already leading the way through to an inner courtyard. I was shown the traditional ravens and crows, the Holy Bramble, which put forth roses when Saint Benedict rolled on it—as always on such occasions the holiness of self-mortification paled in my too literal mind beside the vision of a naked man pounding over the hard earth and taking a long jump into a blackberry bush… ow! yarouch!… and I found the Peruginos easier to feel reverence for.

I discovered absolutely nothing about the summer of 1951, though I discovered a little more about Leverrier. He was at Sacro Speco for only a few weeks, having just finished his novitiate at some monastery in Switzerland. He had been to Cambridge and read history, he spoke fluent Italian, he was “rather unjustifiably believed to be” an authority on the pre-Reformation monastic orders in England, which was why he was at Sacro Speco—to consult sources in the famous library; and he had not been back to Greece since he left it. He remained very much an English intellectual, rather self-conscious, aware that he must look as if he were playing at being a monk, dressing up, and even a little, complicatedly, vain about it.

Finally he took me down some steps and out into the open air below the monastery. I perfunctorily admired the vegetable and vineyard terraces. He led the way to a wooden seat under a fig tree a little farther on. We sat. He did not look at me.

“This is very unsatisfactory for you. But I warned you.”

“It’s a relief to meet a fellow victim. Even if he is mute.”

He stared out across a box-bordered parterre into the blue heat of the sunbaked ravine. I could hear water rushing down in the depths.

“A fellow. Not a victim.”

“I simply wanted to compare notes.”

He paused, then said, “The essence of… his… system is surely that you learn not to 'compare notes.” He made the phrase sound repellent; cheap. His wanting me to go was all but spoken. I stole a look at him.

“Would you be here now if…”

“A lift on the road one has already long been traveling explains when. Not why.”

“Our experiences must have varied very widely.”