The Magus - John Fowles [37]
27
I went with him and sat in his music room and listened to him play the D minor English suite. All through tea I had waited for some indication on his part that he knew I had seen the girl--as he must have known, for it was obvious that the nocturnal concert had been given to announce her presence. But I intended to follow the same course of action as I had over the earlier incident: to say nothing until he gave me an opening. Not the slightest chink had appeared in our conversation. Conchis seemed to me, no expert, to play as if there was no barrier between him and the music; no need to "interpret," to please an audience, to satisfy some inner vanity. He played as I suppose Bach himself would have played--I think at a rather slower tempo than most modern pianists and harpsichordists, though with no loss of rhythm or shape. I sat in the cool, shuttered room and watched the slightly bowed bald head behind the shining black harpsichord. I heard the driving onwardness of Bach, the endless progressions. It was the first time I had heard him play great music, and I was moved as I had been by the Bonnards; moved in a different way, but still moved. The mystery of the old man dwindled, and his humanity rose uppermost. It came to me as I listened that I didn't want to be anywhere else in the world at that moment, that what I was feeling at that moment justified all I had been through, because all I had been through was my being there. Conchis had spoken of meeting his future, of feeling his life balanced on a fulcrum, when he first came to Bourani. I was experiencing what he meant; a new selfacceptance, a sense that I had to be this mind and this body, its vices and its virtues, and that I had no other chance or choice. It was an awareness of a new kind of potentiality, one very different from my old sense of the word, which had been based on the illusions of ambition. The mess of my life, the seffishnesses and false turnings and the treacheries, all these things _could_ fall into place, they _could_ become a source of construction rather than a source of chaos, and precisely because I had no other choice. It was certainly not a moment of new moral resolve, or anything like it; I suppose our accepting what we are must always inhibit our being what we ought to be; for all that, it felt like a step forward--and upward. He had finished, was watching me. "You make words seem shabby things." "Bach does." "And you." He grimaced, but I could see he was not unpleased, though he tried to hide it by marching me off to give his vegetables their evening watering. An hour later I was in the little bedroom again. I saw that I had new books by my bedside. There was first a very thin volume in French, a bound pamphlet, anonymous and privately printed, Paris, 1932; it was entitled _De la communication intermondiale_. I guessed the author easily enough. Then there was a folio: _Wild Life in Scandinavia_. As with _The Beauties of Nature_ of the week before, the "wild life" turned out to be all female--various Nordic-looking women lying, standing, running, embracing among the fir forests and fjords. There were lesbian nuances I didn't much like; perhaps because I was beginning to take against the facet in Conchis's polyhedral character that obviously enjoyed "curious" objects and literature. Of course I was not--at least I told myself I was not--a puritan. I was too young to know that the having to tell myself gave the game away; and that to be uninhibited about one's own sexual activities is not the same as being unshockable. I was English; ergo, puritan. I went twice through the pictures; they clashed unpleasantly with the still-echoing Bach. Finally there was another book in French--a sumptuously produced limited edition: _Le Masque Fran�s au Dix-hniti� Si�e_. This had a little white marker in. Remembering the anthology on the beach, I turned to the page, where there was a passage bracketed. It read: _Aux visiteurs qui p�traient dans l'enceinte des murs altiers de Saint-Martin s'offrait la vue delectable des bergers et berg�s qui, sur les verts gazons et parmi las bosquets, dansaient et chantaient entour