John Fowles - The Magus

Then I saw it. I went through the gap. It was two or three trees in, rusty, barely legible, roughly nailed high up the trunk of a pine, in the sort of position one sees Trespassers will be prosecuted notices in England. But this notice said, in dull red letters on a white background, SALLE D'ATTENTE. It looked as if years ago it had been taken from some French railway station; some ancient student joke. Enamel had come off and cancerous patches of rusty metal showed through. At one end were what looked like several old bullet holes. It was Mitford’s warning: Beware of the waiting room.

I stood on the grassy track, in two minds whether to go on to the house, caught between curiosity and fear of being snubbed. I guessed immediately that this was the villa of the collaborationist he had quarreled with; but I had pictured a shifty, rat-faced Greek Laval rather than someone cultured enough to read, or have guests who could read, Eliot and Auden in the original. I stood so long that I became impatient with my indecision, and forced myself to turn away. I went back through the gap and followed the track up towards the central ridge. It soon petered out into a goatpath, but one that had been recently used, because there were overturned stones that showed earth-red among the sun-bleached grays. When I reached the central ridge, I looked back. From that particular point the house was invisible, but I knew where it lay. The sea and the mountains floated in the steady evening sunshine. It was all peace, elements and void, golden air and mute blue distances, like a Claude; and as I wound down the steep schoolward paths, the northern side of the island seemed oppressed and banal in comparison.

The next morning after breakfast I crossed over to Demetriades’s table. He had been in the village the previous evening and I hadn’t bothered to wait up until he returned. Demetriades was small, very plump, frog-faced, a corfiot with a pathological dislike of sunshine and the rural. He grumbled incessantly about the “disgusting” provincial life we had to lead on the island. In Athens he lived by night, indulging in his two hobbies, whoring and eating. He spent all his money on these two pursuits and on his clothes, and he ought to have looked sallow and oily and corrupt, but he was always pink and immaculate. His hero in history was Casanova. He lacked the Boswellian charm, to say nothing of the genius, of the Italian, but he was in his alternately gay and lugubrious way better company than Mitford had suggested. And at least he was not a hypocrite. He had the charm of all people who believe implicitly in themselves, that of integration.

I took him out into the garden. His nickname was Méli—honey—for which he was a glutton.

“Méli, what do you know about the man over at Bourani?”

“You’ve met him?”

“No.”

“ Ai! ” He shouted petulantly at a boy who was carving a word on an almond tree. The Casanova persona was confined strictly to his private life; in class he was a martinet.

“You don’t know his name?”

“Conchis.” He pronounced the ch hard—the ch of loch .

“Mitford said he had a row with him. A quarrel with him.”

“He was telling lies. He was always telling lies.”

“Maybe. But he must have met him.”

“ Po po .” Po po is Greek for “Tell that to the marines.” “That man never sees anyone. Never. Ask the other professors.”

“But why?”

“ Ech …” He shrugged. “Many old stories. I don’t know them.”

“Come on.”

“It is not interesting.”

We walked down a cobbled path. Méli disliked silence, and in a moment he began to tell me what he knew about Conchis.

“He worked for the Germans in the war. He never comes to the village. The villagers would kill him with stones. So would I, if I saw him.”

I grinned. “Why?”

“Because he is rich and he lives on a desert island like this when he could be in Paris…” he waved his pink right hand in rapid small circles, a favorite gesture. It was his own deepest ambition—an apartment overlooking the Seine, containing a room with no windows and various other peculiar features.

“Does he speak English?”

“I suppose. But why are you so interested?”

“I’m not. I just saw the house.”

The bell for second school rang through the orchards and paths against the high white walls of the school grounds. On the way back to class I invited Méli to have dinner with me in the village the next day.

The leading estiatoras of the village, a great walrus of a man called Sarantopoulos, knew more about Conchis. He came and had a glass of wine with us while we ate the meal he’d cooked. It was true that Conchis was a recluse and never came to the village, but that he had been a collaborationist was a lie. He had been made mayor by the Germans during the Occupation, and had in fact done his best for the villagers. If he was not popular now, it was because he ordered most of his provisions from Athens. He launched out on a long story. The island dialect was difficult, even for Greeks, and I couldn’t understand a word. He leant earnestly across the table. Demetriades looked bored and nodded complacently at the pauses.

“What’s he say, Méli?”

“Nothing. A war story. Nothing at all.”

Sarantopoulos suddenly looked past us. He said something to Demetriades, and stood up. I turned. In the door stood a tall, mournful-looking islander. He went to a table in the far corner, the islanders’ corner, of the long bare room. I saw Sarantopoulos put his hand on the man’s shoulder. The man stared at us doubtfully, then gave in and allowed himself to be led to our table.

“He is the agoyatis of Mr. Conchis.”

“The how much?”

“He has a donkey. He takes the mail and the food to Bourani.”

“What’s his name?” His name was Hermes. I had become far too used to hearing not conspicuously brilliant boys called Socrates and Aristotle, and to addressing the ill-favored old woman who did my room out as Aphrodite, to smile. The donkey driver sat down and rather grudgingly accepted a small tumbler of retsina . He fingered his koumbologi , his amber patience beads. He had a bad eye, fixed, with a sinister pallor. From him Méli, who was much more interested in eating his lobster, extracted a little information.

What did Mr. Conchis do? He lived alone—yes, alone—with a housekeeper, and he cultivated his garden, quite literally, it seemed. He read. He had many books. He had a piano. He spoke many languages. The agoyatis did not know which—all, he thought. Where did he go in winter? Sometimes he went to Athens, and to other countries. Which? The man did not know. He knew nothing about Mitford visiting Bourani. No one ever visited.

“Ask him if he thinks I might visit Mr. Conchis.”

No; it was impossible.

Our curiosity was perfectly natural, in Greece—it was his reserve that was strange. He might have been picked for his sullenness. He stood up to go.

“Are you sure he hasn’t got a harem of pretty girls hidden there?” said Méli. The agoyatis raised his blue chin and eyebrows in a silent no, then turned contemptuously away.

“What a villager!” Having muttered the worst insult in the Greek language at his back, Méli touched my wrist moistly. “My dear fellow, did I ever tell you about the way two men and two ladies I once met on Mykonos made love?”

“Yes. But never mind.”

I felt oddly disappointed. And it was not only because it was the third time I had heard precisely how that acrobatic quartet achieved congress.

Back at the school I picked up, during the rest of the week, a little more. Only two of the masters had been at the school before the war. They had both met Conchis once or twice then, but not since the school had restarted in 1949. One said he was a retired musician. The other had found him a very cynical man, an atheist. But they both agreed that Conchis was a man who cherished his privacy. In the war the Germans had forced him to live in the village. They had one day captured some andarte —resistance fighters—from the mainland and ordered him to execute them. He had refused and had been put before a firing squad with a number of the villagers. But by a miracle he had not been killed outright, and was saved. This was evidently the story Sarantopoulos had told us. In the opinion of many of the villagers, and naturally of all those who’d had relatives massacred in the German reprisal, he should have done what they ordered. But that was all past. He had been wrong, but to the honor of Greece. However, he had never set foot in the village again.