The Magus, A Revised Version (94 page)

Then suddenly.

I understood.

I was not holding a cat in my hand in an underground cistern, I was in a sunlit square ten years before and in my hands I held a German submachine-gun. And it was not Conchis who was now playing the role of Wimmel. Wimmel was inside me, in my stiffened, backthrown arm, in all my past; above all in what I had done to Alison.

The better you understand freedom, the less you possess it.

And my freedom too was in not striking, whatever the cost, whatever eighty other parts of me must die, whatever the watching eyes might think of me; even though it would seem, as they must have foreseen, that I was forgiving them, that I was indoctrinated, their dupe. I lowered the cat, and I could feel tears gathering
–
tears of rage, tears of frustration.

All Conchis
’
s manoeuvrings had been to bring me to this; all the charades, the psychical, the theatrical, the sexual, the psychological; and I was standing as he had stood before the guerilla, unable to beat his brains out; discovering that there are strange times for the calling in of old debts; and even stranger prices to pay.

The group of eleven, standing by the wall; standing with the sedan half-hidden in their centre, as if they were guarding it from me. I saw June, who had the grace not to meet my look. I somehow knew that she was frightened; she for one had not been sure.

The white back.

I walked towards them, towards Conchis. I saw
‘
Anton
’
, who was standing beside him, tilt forward inf
in
itesimally. I knew he was getting on to the balls of his feet ready to spring. Joe was watching me like a hawk, too. I stood in front of Conchis and handed him the cat, handle first. He took it, but he never moved his eyes from mine. We stared at each other for a long moment; that same old stare, simianly observing.

He expected me to speak; to say the word. But I would not. Could not.

I looked round the faces of t
he group. I knew they were only
actors and actresses, but that even the best of their profession cannot in silence act certain human qualities, like intelligence, experience, intellectual honesty; and they had their share of that. Nor could they take part in such a scene without more inducement than money; however much money Conchis
off
ered. I sensed a moment of comprehension between all of us, a strange sort of mutual respect; on their side perhaps no more than a relief that
I
was as they secretly believed me to be, behind all the mysteries and the humiliations; on my side, a dim conviction of having entered some deeper, wiser esoteric society than I could without danger speak in. As I stood there, close to their eleven silences, their faces without hostility yet without concession, faces dissociated from my anger, as close-remote and oblique as the faces in a Flemish Adoration, I felt myself almost physically dwindling; as one dwindles before certain works of art, certain truths, seeing one
’
s smallness, narrow-mindedness, insufficiency in their dimension and value.

I could see it in Conchis
’
s eyes; something besides
eleutheria
had been proved. And I was the only person there who did not know what it was. I looked for it in his eyes; but that was like looking into the darkest night. A hundred things trembled on my lips, in my mind; and died there.

No answer; no movement.

Abruptly I went back to the
‘
throne
’
.

I watched the
‘
students
’
go out, I watched Lily being unfastened. June helped her dress, and they rejoined the others. The frame was removed. Finally only the group of twelve remained. Once again, as drilled as a Sophoclean chorus, they bowed, then turned and walked out.

The men stood aside for the women to lead the way at the arch and Lily was the first to disappear. But when the last of the men had gone, she came back for a moment in the archway, staring at me as I stared at her, her face without expression, without gratitude, leaving a dozen reasons in the air as to why she might have given me this last glimpse; or herself this last glimpse of me.

I was alone with the same three guards who had brought me. They waited a minute, two minutes. Adam
off
ered me a cigarette. I smoked, racked between an anger and a relief, between a feeling that I should have made some excoriating denunciation of them and all their practices and a feeling that I had done the only thing that could leave me any dignity. The cigarette was almost finished when Adam looked at his watch, then at me.

‘
Now

He pointed at the handcuffs that were still dangling from the supports of the armrests.

‘
Look. Finished. No more of this.
’
I stood up, but my arms were caught at once. I took a deep breath. Adam shrugged.

‘
Bitte.
’

I let myself be handcuffed to the two men. Then he came with the gag. That was too much. I began to struggle, but they simply jerked me sharply back on to the throne; once again choiceless, I submitted. He slipped the gag over my head, this time without taping it. Then I was masked, and we set
off
. We walked through the archway, but outside we turned right, not left; we were not going back the way we came. Twenty or thirty paces, then down five steps and apparently into yet another large room or cistern.

I was forced backwards, there was a fiddling with the handcuffs. Then my left arm was abruptly raised, there was a click, and with an icy new apprehension I realized what they had done. I had been fastened to the flogging frame. I really began to struggle then. I kicked and kneed, I wrenched at the man to whose wrist I was still attached. They could have beaten me up at will. There were three of them and I couldn
’
t see and it was ridiculous. But they must have been under orders to do things as gently as possible. Eventually they forced my other arm up and linked it to the second ring. The mask was taken
off
.

It was a very long narrow room, another cistern, but lower-vaulted; eighty feet long and
about twenty wide. Halfway down
was a white cinema screen, like the one that had been used at Bourani. Three-quarters way down, a pair of drawn black curtains stretched the width of the room. The obscure end-wall was just visible over their tops. It was an enlarged version of the chapel at Moutsa with the iconostasis. I was fixed to the frame, but frontways on, and it had been set against the wall. Just in front of me and slightly to my right was a small cinema projector with a reel of 16-mm. film. What light there was came from through the doorway I could see to my left.

My trio of blackshirts wasted no time. They went to the projector, switched it on, checked that the film was correctly fed and then set it going. It began with the black wheel on white, as if it was a film company emblem. One of the men adjusted the lens focus a little. Adam came back and stood in front of me
–
out of reach of any kick I might attempt
–
and spoke.

‘
The final disintoxication.
’

I understood that I had been forced to
‘
forgive
’
so that I could be moved on to this ultimate humiliation; a metaphorical, if not a literal, flogging.

I had still not reached the bottom.

I was alone with the whirring projector and whatever lay beyond the curtains. The emblem faded and words appeared.

POLYMUS FILMS

PRESENT

The screen went white for a moment. Then:

THE SHAMEFUL TRUTH

The black wheel. Then:

WITH

THE FABULOUS
WHORE

IO

A blank.

WHOM YOU WILL REMEMBER AS

ISIS

ASTARTE

KALI

A long blank.

AND AS THE CAPTIVATING

‘LILY MONTGOMERY’

There was a brief shot of Lily kneeling behind a man. It had almost ended before I realized that the man was myself. Someone, Conchis, most have taken us with a telephoto lens, the day she recited from
The Tempest.
I remembered she had even warned me he was using exactly such a camera.

AS THE UNFORGETTABLY DESIREABLE

‘JULIE HOLMES’

Another brief shot: I was standing and kissing her in bright sunlight. The same day, beside the statue of Poseidon.

AND AS THE LEARNED AND COURAGEOUS

‘VANESSA MAXWELL’

This time it was a still. She was behind a desk, a laboratory desk covered with papers. A rack of test-tubes. A microscope. Little Madame Curie.

AND NOW IN HER GREATEST ROLE AS

The wheel reappeared for a moment.

HERSELF!

Blank film.

Then a fade-in shot of Joe in his jackal-mask running down the track towards the house at Bourani; a devil in sunlight; he ran right up into the camera lens, blacking it out.

CO-STARRING

THE MONSTER OF THE
MISSISSIPPI

A blank.

JOE HARRISON

The wheel again.

AS
HIMSELF

T
hen there were words in an over-ornamented frame.

I was going to see a blue film.

It began: a lushly furnished, frill-laden bedroom in Edwardian style. Lily appeared in a peignoir, her hair down. The peignoir gaped absurdly over a black corset. She stopped by a chair to adjust a stocking, in a hackneyed leg-showing routine, though the close-up also allowed her to show the scarred wrist. She looked suddenly towards the door, and called something. A page entered with a letter on a tray. She took it and the page left. Shot of her opening the letter, sneering, and tossing it aside. The camera closed on the letter on the floor.

The quality of the film was bubbly and blistery, badly synchronized, like early silent film. Another flickering framed title appeared.

A new shot. Lily was lying on the bed, with the camera shooting down
on
her. The peignoir had gone. The corset, fishnet stockings. She had managed to give her heavily rouged and mascara
’
d face a suitably pouting and
femme fat
ale
look, but the visual effect was not far removed from the verbal: like so much pornography
–
in this case I supposed intentionally
–
it was dangerously near the ridiculous.

It was all to end in a joke; a joke in bad taste, but a joke.

Back to the same shot. Suddenly she sat up with a leer on the French brothel brass bed. Someone else had come in.

A shot of the open door. It was Joe, dressed in absurdly tight trousers and a sort of loose-sleeved white blouse. More like a black bullfighter than a black bull. He closed the door; a smouldering look.

The film veered into nastiness. There was a shot of her running to meet him. He stepped forward and gripped her by the arms and then they were kissing wildly. He forced her back to the bed and they fell across it. Then she rolled on top of him, covering his face, his neck in kisses.

She was standing in the black underwear, against the wall, her arms out. Joe was kneeling in front of her, bare above the waist, feeling with open hands up over her corset to her breasts. She caught his head and pressed it against her.