John Fowles - The Magus

“I am mad?”

“Mistaken.”

“No. Neither mad nor mistaken.”

“You… travel to other worlds?”

“Yes. I travel to other worlds.”

I put the glass down and pulled out a cigarette; lit it before speaking.

“In the flesh?”

“If you can tell me where the flesh ends and the mind begins, I will answer that.”

“You um… you have some evidence of this?”

“Ample evidence.” He allowed a moment to pass. “For those with the intelligence to see it.”

“This is what you meant by election and being psychic?”

“In part.”

I was silent. I was thinking that I must make up my mind what course of action to take. I sensed a sort of inherent hostility to him in myself, which rose from beyond anything that had passed between us; a subconscious resistance of water against oil.

I decided to pursue a course of polite scepticism.

“You do this… traveling by, I don’t know, something like telepathy?”

But before he could answer there was a soft slap of footsteps round the colonnade. Maria stood and bobbed.

“ Sas efcharistoume , Maria. Dinner is served,” said Conchis.

We stood and went in to the music room. As we put our glasses on the tray he said, “There are things that words cannot explain.”

I looked down. “At Oxford we are taught to assume that if words can’t explain, nothing else is likely to.”

“Very well.” He smiled. “May I call you Nicholas now?”

“Of course. Please.”

He poured a drop of ouzo into our glasses. We raised and clinked them.

“ Eis 'ygeia sas, Nicholas .”

“ Sygeia .”

But I had a strong suspicion even then that he was drinking to something other than my health.

The table in the corner of the terrace glittered, an unexpectedly opulent island of glass and silver in the darkness. It was lit by one tall lamp with a dark shade; the light flowed downwards, concentrated on the white cloth, and was then reflected up, lighting our faces strangely, Caravaggio fashion, against the surrounding darkness.

The meal was excellent. We ate small fish cooked in wine, a delicious chicken, herb-flavored cheese and a honey-and-curd flan made, according to Conchis, from a medieval Turkish recipe. The wine we drank had a trace of resin, as if the vineyard had merely been beside a pine forest, and was nothing like the harsh turpentine-tasting rotgut I sometimes drank in the village. We ate largely in silence. He evidently preferred this. If we talked, it was of the food. He ate slowly, and very little, but I left Maria nothing to take away.

When we had finished, Maria brought Turkish coffee in a brass pot and took the lamp, which was beginning to attract too many insects. She replaced it by a single candle. The flame rose untrembling in the still air; now and again a persistent insect would fly around, in, around and away. I lit my cigarette, and sat like Conchis, half-turned towards the sea and the south. He did not want to talk, and I was content to wait.

Suddenly there were footsteps below on the gravel. They were going away from the house towards the sea. At first I took them for Maria’s, though it seemed strange that she should be going down to the beach at that time. But a second later I knew that they could not, or could no more plausibly than the glove, be hers.

They were light, rapid, quiet steps, as if the person was trying to make as little noise as possible. They might even have belonged to a child. I was sitting away from the parapet, and could see nothing below. I glanced at Conchis. He was staring out into the darkness as if the sound was perfectly normal. I shifted unobtrusively, to crane a look over the parapet. But the steps had passed away into silence. With alarming speed a large moth dashed at the candle, repeatedly and frantically, as if attached to it by elastic cord. Conchis leant forward and snuffed the flame.

“You do not mind sitting in darkness?”

“Not at all.”

It occurred to me that it might after all have really been a child, from one of the cottages at the bay to the east; someone who had come to help Maria. I was just about to ask when Conchis spoke.

“I should tell you how I came here.”

“It must have been a marvelous site to find.”

“Of course. But I am not talking of architecture.” He sat staring out to sea, his face like a death mask, emotionless. “I came to Phraxos looking for a house to rent. A house for a summer. I did not like the village. I do not like coasts that face north. On my last day I had a boatman take me round the island. For pleasure. By chance he landed me for a swim at Moutsa down there. By chance he said there was an old cottage up here. By chance I came up. The cottage was crumbled walls. A litter of stones choked with thorn-ivy. It was very hot. About four o'clock on the afternoon of April the eighteenth, 1929.”

He paused, as if the memory of that year had stopped him; and to prepare me for a new facet of himself; a new shift.

“There were many more trees then. One could not see the sea. I stood in the little clearing round the ruined walls. I had immediately the sensation that I was expected. Something had been waiting there all my life. I stood there, and I knew who waited, who expected. It was myself. I was here and this house was here, you and I and this evening were here, and they had always been here, like reflections of my own coming. It was like a dream. I had been walking towards a closed door, and by a sudden magic its impenetrable wood became glass, through which I saw myself coming from the other direction, the future. I speak in analogies. You understand?”

I nodded, cautious, not concerned with understanding; because underlying everything he did I had come to detect an air of stage management, of the planned and rehearsed. He did not tell me of his coming to Bourani as a man tells something that chances to occur to him, but far more as a dramatist tells an anecdote where the play requires. He went on.

“I knew at once that I must live here. I could not go beyond. It was only here that my past would merge into my future. So I stayed. I am here tonight. And you are here tonight.”

In the darkness he was looking sideways at me. I said nothing for a moment; there had seemed to be some special emphasis on the last sentence.

“Is this also what you meant by being psychic?”

“It is what I mean by being fortunate. There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be. You are too young to know this. You are still becoming. Not being.”

“Perhaps.”

“Not perhaps. For certain.”

“What happens if one doesn’t recognize the… point of fulcrum?” But I was thinking, I have had it already—the silence in the trees, the siren of the Athens boat, the black mouth of the shotgun barrels.

“You will be like the many. Only the few recognize this moment. And act on it.”

“The elect?”

“The elect. The chosen by hazard.” I heard his chair creak. “Look over there. The lamp fishermen.” Away at the far feet of the mountains there was a thin dust of ruby lights in the deepest shadows. I didn’t know whether he meant simply, look; or that the lamps were in some way symbolic of the elect.

“You’re very tantalizing sometimes, Mr. Conchis.”

“I am prepared to be less so.”

“I wish you would be.”

He was silent again.

“Suppose that what I might tell you should mean more to your life than the mere listening?”

“I hope it would.”

Another pause.

“I do not want politeness. Politeness always conceals a refusal to face other kinds of reality. I am going to say something about you that may shock you. I know something about you that you do not know yourself.” He paused, again as if to let me prepare myself. “You too are psychic, Nicholas. You are sure you are not. I know that.”