John Fowles - The Magus

I lit a cigarette, and after a while I smiled. In that small bare room, it seemed not to matter, even if I was a shade scared. The truth was that I was full of a sort of green stir. Conchis was no more than the chance agent, the event that had come at the right time; just as in the old days, I might, after a celibate term at Oxford, have met a girl and begun an affaire with her; I had begun something exciting with him. It seemed linked in a way with my wanting to see Alison again. I wanted to live again.

The house was as quiet as death, as the inside of a skull; but the year was 1953, I was an atheist and an absolute nonbeliever in spiritualism, ghosts and all that mumbo-jumbo. I lay there waiting for the half-hour to pass; and the silence of the house was still, that day, much more a silence of peace than one of fear.

When I went downstairs, the music room was lamplit but empty. There was a tray on the table in front of the stove with a bottle of ouzo , a jug of water, glasses and a bowl of fat blue-black Amphissa olives. I poured out some ouzo and added enough water to make it go milkily opaque. Then, glass in hand, I began a tour of the bookshelves. The books were methodically arranged. There were two entire sections of medical works, mostly in French, and many—they hardly seemed to go with spiritualism—on psychiatry, and another two of scientific books of all kinds; several shelves of philosophical works, and also a fair number of botanical and ornithological books, mostly in English and German; but the great majority of all the rest were autobiographies and biographies. There must have been thousands of them. They appeared to have been collected without any method: Wordsworth, Mae West, Saint-Simon, geniuses, criminals, saints, nonentities. The collection had the eclectic impersonality of a public library.

Behind the harpsichord and under the window there was a low glass cabinet which contained two or three classical pieces. There was a rhyton in the form of a human head, a black-figure kylix on one side, a small red-figure amphora on the other. On top of the cabinet were also three objects: a photo, an eighteenth-century clock and a white-enameled snuffbox. I went behind the music stool to look at the Greek pottery. The painting on the flat inner bowl of the kylix gave me a shock. It involved two satyrs and a woman and was very obscene indeed. Nor were the paintings on the amphora of a kind any museum would dare put on display.

Then I looked closer at the clock. It was mounted in ormolu with an enameled face. In the middle was a rosy little naked cupid; the shaft of the one short hand came through his loins, and the rounded tip at its end made it very clear what it was meant to be. There were no hours marked round the dial, and the whole of the right-hand half was blacked out, with the word Sleep in white upon it. On the other half, enameled in white, were written in neat black script the following faded but still legible words: at six, Exhaustion ; at eight, Enchantment ; at ten, Erection ; at twelve, Ecstasy . The cupid smiled; the clock was not going and his manhood hung permanently askew at eight. I opened the innocent white snuffbox. Beneath the lid was enacted, in Boucheresque eighteenth-century terms, exactly the same scene as some ancient Greek had painted in the kylix two thousand years before.

It was between these two objets that Conchis had chosen, whether with perversion, with humor, or with simple bad taste, I couldn’t decide, to place another photo of the Edwardian girl, his dead fiancée.

She looked out of the oval silver frame with alert, smiling eyes. Her splendidly white skin and fine neck were shown off by a square décolletage, messy swathes of lace tied over her bosom by what seemed a white shoelace. By one armpit was a floppy black bow. She looked very young, as if she was wearing her first evening dress; and in this photo she looked less heavy featured; rather piquant, a touch of mischief, almost as if she rather enjoyed being queen of a cabinet of curiosa.

A door closed upstairs, and I turned away. The eyes of the Modigliani seemed to glare at me severely, so I sneaked out under the colonnade, where a minute later Conchis joined me. He had changed into a pair of pale trousers and a dark cotton coat. He stood silhouetted in the soft light that flowed out of the room and silently toasted me. The mountains were just visible, dusky and black, like waves of charcoal, the sky beyond still not quite drained of afterglow. But overhead—I was standing on the steps down to the gravel—the stars were out. They sparkled less fierily than they do in England; tranquilly, as if they were immersed in limpid oil.

“Thank you for the bedside books.”

“If you see anything more interesting on the shelves, take it up. Please.”

There was a strange call from the dark trees to the east of the house. I had heard it in the evenings at the school, and at first thought it made by some moronic village boy. It was very high pitched, repeated at regular intervals. Kew . Kew . Kew . Like a melancholy transmigrated bus conductor.

“There is my friend,” said Conchis. For an absurd and alarming moment I thought he must mean the woman of the glove. I saw her flitting through the island trees in her Ascot gloves, forever searching for Kew. The call came again, eery and stupid, from the night behind us. Conchis counted five slowly, and the call came as he raised his hand. Then five again, and again it came.

“What is it?”

“ Otus scops . The scops owl. It is very small. Not twenty centimeters. Like this.”

“I saw you had some books on birds.”

“Ornithology interests me.”

“And you have studied medicine.”

“I studied medicine. Many years ago.”

“And never practiced?”

“Only on myself.”

Far out to sea to the west I saw the bright lights of the Athens boat. On Saturday nights it went on south down to Kythera. But instead of relating Bourani to the ordinary world, the distant ship seemed only to emphasize its hiddenness, its secrecy. I took the plunge.

“What did you mean by saying that you were psychic?”

“What did you think I meant?”

“Spiritualism?”

“Infantilism.”

“That’s what I think.”

“Of course.”

I could just make out his face in the light from the doorway. He could see more of mine, because I had swung round and sat against a column.

“You haven’t really answered my question.”

“Your first reaction is the characteristic one of your contrasuggestible century: to disbelieve, to disprove. I see this very clearly underneath your politeness. You are like a porcupine. When that animal has its spines erect, it cannot eat. If you do not eat, you will starve. And your prickles will die with the rest of your body.”

I swilled the last of the ouzo round in my glass. “Isn’t it your century too?”

“I have lived a great deal in other centuries.”

“In literature.”

“In reality.”

The owl called again, at monotonously regular intervals. I stared out into the darkness of the pines.

“Reincarnation?”

“Is rubbish.”

“Then…” I shrugged.

“I cannot escape my human life span. So there is only one way I could have lived in other centuries.”

I was silent. “I give up.”

“Not give up. Look up. What do you see?”

“Stars. Space.”

“And what else? That you know are there. Though they are not visible.”

“Other worlds?”

I turned to look at him. He sat, a black shadow. I felt a chill run down my spine. Not at the supernatural, but at the now proven realization that I was with a madman. He took the thought out of my mind.