John Fowles - The Magus

It was like being a champion at tennis, and condemned to play with rabbits, as well as having always to get their wretched balls out of the net for them. I would look out of the window at the blue sky and the cypresses and the sea, and pray for the day’s end, when I could retire to the masters’ wing, lie back on my bed and sip an ouzo . Bourani seemed greenly remote from all that; so far, and yet so near; its small mysteries, which grew smaller as the week passed, no more than an added tang in its other promise of civilized pleasure.

This time he was waiting for me at the table. I dumped my dufflebag by the wall and he called for Maria to bring the tea. He was much less eccentric, perhaps because he had transparently determined to pump me. We talked about the school, about Oxford, my family, about teaching English to foreigners, about why I had come to Greece. Though he kept asking questions, I still felt that he had no real interest in what I was saying. What interested him was something else, some specificness I exhibited, some category I filled. I was not interesting in myself, but only as an example. I tried once or twice to reverse our roles, but he again made it clear that he did not want to talk about himself. I said nothing about the glove.

Only once did he seem really surprised. He had asked me about my unusual name.

“French. My ancestors were Huguenots.”

“Ah.”

“There’s a writer called Honoré d'Urfé—”

He gave me a swift look. “He is an ancestor of yours?”

“It’s just a family tradition. No one’s ever traced it. As far as I know.” Poor old d'Urfé; I had used him before to suggest centuries of high culture lay in my blood. Conchis’s smile was genuinely warm, almost radiant, and I smiled back. “That makes a difference?”

“It is amusing.”

“It’s probably all rubbish.”

“No, no, I believe it. And have you read L'Astree ?”

“For my pains. Terrible bore.”

“ Oui, un peu fade. Mais pa.s tout a fait sans charmes. ” Impeccable accent; he could not stop smiling. “So you speak French.”

“Not very well.”

“I have a direct link with le grand siècle at my table.”

“Hardly direct.”

But I didn’t mind his thinking it; his sudden flattering benignity. He stood up.

“Now. In your honor. Today I will play Rameau.”

He led the way into the room, which ran the whole width of the house. Books lined three walls. At one end there was a green-glazed tile stove under a mantelpiece on which stood two bronzes, one a modern one. Above them was a life-size reproduction of a Modigliani, a fine portrait of a somber woman in black against a glaucous green background.

He sat me in an armchair, sorted through some scores, found the one he wanted; began to play, short, chirrupy little pieces, then some elaborately ornamented courantes and passacaglias. I didn’t much like them, but I realized he played with some mastery. He might be pretentious in other ways, but he was not posing at the keyboard. He stopped abruptly, in midpiece, as if a light had fused; pretention began again.

“ Voilà .”

“Very nice.” I determined to stamp out the French flu before it spread. “I’ve been admiring that.” I nodded at the reproduction.

“Yes?” We went and stood in front of it. “My mother.”

For a moment I thought he was joking.

“Your mother?”

“In name. In reality, it is his mother. It was always his mother.” I looked at the woman’s eyes; they hadn’t the usual fishlike pallor of Modigliani eyes. They stared, they watched, they were simian. I also looked at the painted surface. With a delayed shock I realized I was not looking at a reproduction.

“Good Lord. It must be worth a fortune.”

“No doubt.” He spoke without looking at me. “You must not think that because I live simply here I am poor. I am very rich.” He said it as if “very rich” was a nationality; as perhaps it is. I stared at the picture again. I think it was the first time I had seen a really valuable modern picture hanging in a private house. “It cost me… nothing. And that was charity. I should like to say that I recognized his genius. But I did not. No one did. Not even the clever Mr. Zborowski.”

“You knew him?”

“Modigliani? I met him. Many times. I knew Max Jacob, who was a friend of his. That was in the last year of his life. He was quite famous by then. One of the sights of Montparnasse.”

I stole a look at Conchis as he gazed up at the picture; he had, by no other logic than that of cultural snobbery, gained a whole new dimension of social respectability for me, and I began to feel much less sure of his eccentricity and his phoniness, of my own superiority in the matter of what life was really about.

“You must wish you bought more from him.”

“I did.”

“You still own them?”

“Of course. Only a bankrupt would sell beautiful paintings. They are in my other houses.” I stored away that plural; one day I would mimic it to someone.

“Where are your… other houses?”

“Do you like this?” He touched the bronze of a young man beneath the Modigliani. “This is a maquette by Rodin. My other houses. Well. In France. In the Lebanon. In America. I have business interests all over the world.” He turned to the other characteristically skeletal bronze. “And this is by the Italian sculptor Giacometti.”

I looked at it, then at him. “I’m staggered. Here on Phraxos.”

“Why not?”

“Thieves?”

“If you have many valuable paintings, as I have—I will show you two more upstairs later—you make a decision. You treat them as what they are—squares of painted canvas. Or you treat them as you would treat gold ingots. You put bars on your windows, you lie awake at night worrying. There.” He indicated the bronzes. “If you want, steal them. I shall tell the police, but you may get away with them. The only thing you will not do is make me worry.”

“They’re safe from me.”

“And on Greek islands, no thieves. But I do not like everyone to know they are here.”

“Of course.”

“This picture is interesting. It was omitted from the only catalogue raisonné of his work I have seen. You see also it is not signed. However—it would not be difficult to authenticate. I will show you. Take the corner.”

He moved the Rodin to one side and we lifted the frame down. He tilted it for me to see. On the back were the first few lines of a sketch for another painting, then scrawled across the lower half of the untreated canvas were some illegible words with numbers beside them, added up at the bottom, by the stretcher.

“Debts. That one there.” Toto . “Toto was the Algerian he bought his hashish from.” He pointed: Zbo . “Zborowski.”

I stared down at those careless, drunken scrawls; felt the immediacy of the man, and the terrible but necessary alienation of genius from ordinariness. A man who would touch you for ten francs; and go home and paint what would one day be worth ten million. Conchis watched me.

“This is the side the museums never show.”

“Poor devil.”

“He would say the same of us. With much more reason.”

I helped him put the frame back.

Then he made me look at the windows. They were rather small and narrow, arched, each one with a center pillar and a capital of carved marble.

“These come from Monemvasia. I found them built into a cottage. So I bought the cottage.”

“Like an American.”

He did not smile. “They are Venetian. Of the fifteenth century.” He turned to the bookshelves and pulled down an art book. “Here.” I looked over his shoulder and saw Fra Angelico’s famous Annunciation ; and at once knew why the colonnade outside had seemed so familiar. There was even the same white-edged floor of red tiles.