The Magus - John Fowles [95]
62
I was alone with the same three guards who had brought me. They waited a minute, two minutes. Adam offered 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 and all their practises 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 arrnrests. "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 onto 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 realised 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 lowervaulted; 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. 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 i6-mrn. 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 disintoxication." I understood that I had been forced to "forgive" so that I could be moved on to this final 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. WHO 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 realised that the man was myself. Someone, Conchis, must have taken us with a telephoto lens, the day she recited "The frog he would a-wooing go"; she had even warned me he was using exactly such a camera. AS THE UNFORGETTABLY DESIRABLE JULIE HOLMES Another brief shot: I was standing and kissing her in bright sunlight. The vegetable-garden terrace. She wore the white linen suit. It had been done on that last morning at Bourani, after the others had left. 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. 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 Then there were words in an over-ornamented frame: ------------------------- Lady Jane, a depraved young aristocrat, in her hotel room ------------------------- 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 synchronised, like early silent film. Another ffickering framed title appeared. --------------------------------------------- ... now I know the abominable truth about your perverted lusts, all is over between us. I remain, but not for long, your disgusted husband... LORD de VERE!" --------------------------------------------- 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 fatale_ 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. --------------------------------------------- Panting with desire she waits for the arrival of her coal-black partner in unspeakable sin. --------------------------------------------- Back to the same shot. Suddenly she sat up with a leer on the French brothel brass bed. Someone else had come in. ------------------------ The entry of Black Bull, a vaudeville singer ------------------------ 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 only language they know --------------------------- 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. An echo of the hotel on Phraxos. ------------------------------- A buck nigger and a white woman ------------------------------- She was standing in the black underwear, against the wall, her arms out, another vicious echo of the night in the hotel. Of course the incidents of that night had been echoes of the already made film. 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. ------------------------------------ For this she has sacrificed a loving husband, lovely children, friends, relations, religion, all. ------------------------------------ Next there came a five-second fetishist interlude. He was lying on the floor. There was a close shot of a naked leg ending in a foot in a high-heeled black shoe resting on his stomach. He caressed it with his hands. I began to suspect. It could easily have been any white woman's leg; and any black man's stomach and hands. ------------- Passion rises ------------- A shot across the room of her pressing him back against the wall, kissing him. His hand slipped round her back and began to unhook the corset. A long bare back, a very short echo, bound in black arms. The camera closed, then tracked down clumsily. A black hand moved suggestively into shot. Joe was now apparently naked, though hidden by her white body. I could see his face, but the quality of the film was so bad that I could not be sure it was Joe. And her face was invisible throughout. --------- Shameless --------- I forced myself to be more suspicious than shocked. A series of very short shots. Bare white breasts, bare black thighs; two naked figures on the bed. But the camera was too far back to make identification possible. The woman's blonde hair began to seem too blonde, too shiny: wiglike. ------------------------------------ Decent people lead ordinary lives while this bestial orgy takes place. ------------------------------------ A street shot in a city I did not recognise, though it looked American. Crowded pavements, a rush hour. It was of better quality than the other sequences and had obviously been cut in from some other film; and it made the "blue" sequences seem even more antiquated and claustrophobic. ---------------- Obscene caresses ---------------- An anonymous white hand stroked an anonymous phallus in one of the most unexceptionable caresses of love. Its obscenity lay in the fact that two people could lie and be photographed doing it. But it was the wrist of the right, the unscarred hand that was in the frame; and although it made a playful flute-fingering gesture, I was becoming more and more suspicious. -------------- The invitation -------------- There was the most brutally pornographic shot yet, down angled, of the girl lying on the bed. Once again it did not reveal her face, which was twisted back almost out of sight. It showed her waiting to receive the Negro, whose blurred dark back was close to the camera. --------- Meanwhile --------- Suddenly the quality of the film changed. It was shot, very jerkily, by a different camera in different circumstances. Two people in a crowded restaurant. With an acute shock, a flush of bitter anger, I saw who it was: Alison and myself, that first evening, in the Piraeus. There was a flash of blank film, then another shot of us, which for a moment I could not place. Alison walking down a steep village street, myself a yard or two behind her. We both looked exhausted; and though it was too far to see the facial expressions, one could tell from that gap between us, the way we walked, that we were miserable. I recognised it: our return to Arachova. The cameraman must have been hidden in a cottage, shooting from behind a shutter perhaps, because a transverse black bar obscured the end of the shot. I remembered the wartime sequence of Wimmel. I also recognised the implications; that we had been followed, watched and filmed throughout. It would not have been possible on the bare upper slopes of Parnassus, but in the trees... I remembered the pool, the sun on my naked back and Alison beneath me. It was too horrible, too blasphemous, that that, of all moments, could have been public. Stripped, flayed by the knowledge; and their always knowing. Blank film again. Then another title. --------------------- The act of copulation --------------------- But the film ran through a series of numbers and flashing white scratches: the end of the reel. There was a ffipping sound from the projector. The screen stared white. Someone ran in through the door and switched the projector off. I gave a grunt of contempt; I had been waiting for that failure of nerve, of the courage of their pornography. But the man--I saw by the faint light through the door that it was Adam--walked to the screen and lifted it aside. I was left alone again. For thirty seconds or so the room remailled in darkness. Then light came from behind the curtains. Someone began to pull them, from behind, by cords, as they do for plays in parish halls. When they were about two-thirds open, they stopped; but long before that the parallel with parish halls had vanished. The light came from a shade hung from the ceiling. It let no light through, so that the illumination was thrown down in a brilliant, intimate cone onto what lay beneath. A low couch, covered by a huge golden-tawny rug, perhaps an Afghan carpet. On it, superbly white and completely naked, was Lily. She was lying against a mound of pillows, deep gold, amber, rose, maroon, themselves piled against an ornate gilt and carved headboard. She was turned sideways towards me in a deliberate imitation of Goya's _Maja Desnuda_. Her hands behind her head, her nakedness offered. Not flaunted, but offered, stated as a divine and immemorial fact. A bare armpit, as sexual as a loin. Nipples the colour of cornelians, as if they alone in all that cream-white skin had been, or could be, bitten and bruised. The tapering curves, thighs, ankles, small bare feet. And the level, unmoving eyes staring with a kind of arrogant calm into the shadows where I hung. Beyond her, on the rear wall, had been painted an arcade of slender white arches. I thought at first that they were meant to represent Bourani; but they were too narrow, and had slender Moorish-ogive tops. Goya... the Alhambra? I realised the couch was not legless, but that the far end of the room was on a slightly lower level, rather like a Roman bath. The curtains had concealed further steps down. The gleaming body lay in its greenish-tawny lake of light, without movement; and she stared at me as from a canvas. The tableau pose was held so long that I began to think this was the great finale; this living painting, this naked enigma, this forever unattainable. I had assumed it was Lily, but I could not see the scar, and I began to waver. It was Lily; it was Rose; then Lily again. Minutes passed. The lovely body lay in its mystery. I could just see the imperceptible swell of her breathing... or could I? For a few moments it was neither Lily nor Rose. I was looking at a magnificently lifelike wax effigy. But then she moved. Her head turned in profile and her right arm reached out gracefully and invitingly, in the classical gesture of R