John Fowles - The Magus

When he came out he took me off to water his vegetables. The water had to be drawn up out of one of a battery of long-necked cisterns behind the cottage, and when we had done that and fed the plants we sat on a seat by the Priapus arbor, with the unusual smell, in summer Greece, of verdant wet earth all around us. He did his deep-breathing exercises; evidently, like so much else in his life, ritual; then smiled at me and jumped back twenty-four hours.

“Now tell me about this girl.” It was a command, not a question, or rather a refusal to believe I could refuse again.

“There’s nothing really to tell.”

“She turned you down.”

“No. Or not at the beginning. I turned her down.”

“And now you wish… ?”

“It’s all over. It’s all too late.”

“You sound like Adonis. Have you been gored?”

There was a silence. I took the step; something that had nagged me ever since I had discovered he was a doctor; and also to shock his old man’s mocking of my young man’s fatalism.

“As a matter of fact I have.” He looked sharply at me. “By syphilis. I managed to get it early this year in Athens.” Still he observed me. “It’s all right. I think I’m cured.”

“Who diagnosed it?”

“The man in the village. Patarescu.”

“Tell me the symptoms.”

“The clinic in Athens confirmed his diagnosis.”

“No doubt.” His voice was dry, so dry that my mind leapt to what he hinted at. “Now tell me the symptoms.”

In the end he got them out of me; in every detail.

“As I thought. You had soft sore.”

“Soft sore?”

“Chancroid. Ulcus molle . A very common disease in the Mediterranean. Unpleasant, but harmless. The best cure is frequent soap and water.”

“Then why the hell…”

He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together in the ubiquitous Greek gesture for money, for money and corruption; I suddenly felt like Candide.

“Have you paid?”

“Yes. For this special penicillin.”

“You can do nothing.”

“I can damn well sue the clinic.”

“You have no proof that you did not have syphilis.”

“You mean Patarescu—”

“I mean nothing. He acted with perfect medical correctness. A test is always advisable.” It was almost as if he were on their side. He shrugged gently: what was, was.

“He could have warned me.”

“Perhaps he thought it more important to warn you against venery than venality.”

I hit my thigh with my clenched fist. “Christ.”

We fell silent. In me battled a flood of relief at being reprieved and anger at such vile deception. At last Conchis spoke again.

“Even if it had been syphilis—why could you not return to this girl you love?”

“Really—it’s too complicated.”

“Then it is usual. Not unusual.”

Slowly, disconnectedly, prompted by him, I told him a bit about Alison; remembering his frankness the night before, produced some of my own. Once again I felt no real sympathy coming from him; simply his obsessive and inexplicable curiosity. I told him I had recently written a letter.

“And if she does not answer?”

I shrugged. “She doesn’t.”

“You think of her, you want to see her—you must write again.” I smiled then, briefly, at his energy. “You are leaving it to hazard. We no more have to leave everything to hazard than we have to drown in the sea.” He shook my shoulder. “Swim!”

“It’s not swimming. It’s knowing in which direction to swim.”

“Towards the girl. She sees through you, you say, she understands you. That is good.”

I was silent. A primrose and black butterfly, a swallowtail, hovered over the bougainvillea around the Priapus arbor, found no honey, and glided away through the trees. I scuffed the gravel. “I suppose I don’t know what love is, really. If it isn’t all sex. And I don’t even really care a damn any more, anyway.”

“My dear young man, you are a disaster. So defeated. So pessimistic.”

“I was rather ambitious once. I ought to have been blind as well. Then perhaps I wouldn’t feel defeated.” I looked at him. “It’s not all me. It’s in the age. In all my generation. We all feel the same.”

“In the greatest age of enlightenment in the history of this earth? When we have destroyed more darkness in this last fifty years than in the last five million?”

“As at Neuve Chapelle? Hiroshima?”

“But you and I! We live, we are this wonderful age. We are not destroyed. We did not even destroy.”

“No man is an island.”

“Pah. Rubbish. Every one of us is an island. If it were not so we should go mad at once. Between these islands are ships, airplanes, telephones, television—what you will. But they remain islands. Islands that can sink or disappear forever. You are an island that has not sunk. You cannot be such a pessimist. It is not possible.”

“It seems possible.”

“Come with me.” He stood up, as if time was vital. “Come. I will show you the innermost secret of life. Come.” He walked quickly round to the colonnade. I followed him upstairs. There he pushed me out onto the terrace.

“Go and sit at the table. With your back to the sun.”

In a minute he appeared, carrying something heavy draped in a white towel. He put it carefully on the center of the table. Then he paused, made sure I was looking, before gravely he removed the cloth. It was a stone head, whether of a man or a woman it was difficult to say. The nose had been broken short. The hair was done in a fillet, with two side-pieces. But the power of the fragment was in the face. It was set in a triumphant smile, a smile that would have been smug if it had not been so full of the purest metaphysical good humor. The eyes were faintly Oriental, long, and as I saw, for Conchis put a hand over the mouth, also smiling. The mouth was beautifully modeled, timelessly intelligent and timelessly amused.

“That is the truth. Not the hammer and sickle. Not the stars and stripes. Not the cross. Not the sun. Not gold. Not yin and yang. But the smile.”

“It’s Cycladic, isn’t it?”

“Never mind what it is. Look at it. Look into its eyes.”

He was right. The little sunlit thing had some numen—or not so much a divinity, as a having known divinity—in it; of being ultimately certain. But as I looked, I began to feel something else.

“There’s something implacable in that smile.”

“Implacable?” He came behind my chair and looked down over my head. “It is the truth. Truth is implacable. But the nature and meaning of this truth is not.”

“Tell me where it came from.”

“From Didyma in Asia Minor.”

“How old is it?”

“The sixth or seventh century before Christ.”

He sat on the parapet, his arms folded.

“I wonder if it would have that smile if it knew of Belsen.”

“Because they died, we know we still live. Because a star explodes and a thousand worlds like ours die, we know this world is. That is the smile: that what might not be, is.” A long silence. Then he said, “When I die, I shall have this by my bedside. It is the last face I want to see.”

The little head watched our watching; bland, certain, and almost maliciously inscrutable. It flashed on me that it was also the smile that Conchis sometimes wore; as if he sat before the head and practiced it. At the same time I realized exactly what I disliked about it. It was above all the smile of dramatic irony, of those who have privileged information. I looked back up at Conchis’s face; and knew I was right.

A starry darkness over the house, the forest, the sea; the dinner cleared away, the lamp extinguished. I lay back in the long chair. He let the night silently envelop and possess us; time fall away; then began to draw me back down the decades.