by John Fowles
I raised the gun again until the barrel was pointing at me. The stick projected, waiting for my feet to jerk down. The air was very silent. Many miles away I heard the siren of the Athens boat, approaching the island. But it was like something outside a vacuum. Death was now.
I did nothing. I waited. The afterglow, the palest yellow, then a luminous pale-green, then a limpid stained-glass blue, held in the sky over the sea of mountains to the west. I waited, I waited, I heard the siren closer, I waited for the will, the black moment, to come to raise my feet and kick down; and I could not. All the time I felt I was being watched, that I was not alone, that I was putting on an act for the benefit of someone, that this action could be done only if it was spontaneous, pure – and moral. Because more and more it crept through my mind with the chill spring night that I was trying to commit not a moral action, but a fundamentally aesthetic one; to do something that would end my life sensationally, significantly, consistently. It was a Mercutio death I was looking for, not a real one. A death to be remembered, not the true death of a true suicide, the death obliterate.
And the voice; the light; the sky.
It began to grow dark, the siren of the receding Athens boat moaned, and I still sat smoking, with the gun by my side. I re-evaluated myself. I saw that I was from now on, for ever, contemptible. I had been, and remained, intensely depressed, but I had also been, and always would be, intensely false; in existentialist terms, inauthentic. I knew I would never kill myself, I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.
I raised the gun and fired it blindly into the sky. The crash shook me. There was an echo, some falling twigs. Then the heavy well of silence.
‘Did you kill anything?’ asked the old man at the gate. ‘One shot,’ I said. ‘I missed.’
9
Years later I saw the gabbia at Piacenza: a harsh black canary-cage strung high up the side of the towering campanile, in which prisoners were once left to starve to death and rot in full view of the town below. And looking up at it I remembered that winter in Greece, that gabbia I had constructed for myself out of light, solitude, and self-delusions. To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape. And my feelings, at the end of that wretched term, were those of a man who knows he is in a cage, exposed to the jeers of all his old ambitions until he dies.
But I went to Athens, to the address the village doctor gave me. I was given a Kahn test and Dr Patarescu’s diagnosis was confirmed. The ten days’ treatment was very expensive; most of the drugs had been smuggled into Greece, or stolen, and I was at the receiving end of a Third Man network. The smooth young American-trained doctor told me not to worry; the prognosis was excellent. At the end of the Easter holidays, when I returned to the island, I found a card from Alison. It was a garishly coloured thing with a kangaroo on it balloon-saying ‘Thought I’d forgot?’ My twenty-sixth birthday had taken place while I was in Athens. The postmark was Amsterdam. There was no message. It was simply signed ‘Alison’. I threw it into the wastepaper basket. But that evening, I took it out again.
To get through the anxious wait for the secondary stage not to develop, I began quietly to rape the island. I swam and swam, I walked and walked, I went out every day. The weather rapidly became hot, and during the heat of the afternoon the school slept. Then I used to take off into the pine-forest. I always went over the central crest to the south side of the island if I could, away from the village and the school. There, was absolute solitude: three hidden cottages at one small bay, a few tiny chapels lost among the green downward of pines and deserted except on their saints’ days, and one almost invisible villa, which was in any case empty. The rest was sublimely peaceful, as potential as a clean canvas, a site for myths. It was as if the island was split into dark and light; so that the teaching timetable, which made it difficult to go far except at weekends or by getting up very early (school began at half past seven), became as irksome as a short tether.
I did not think about the future. In spite of what the doctor at the clinic had said I felt certain that the cure would fail. The pattern of destiny seemed clear: down and down, and down.
But then the mysteries began.
2
Irrités de ce premier crime, les monstres ne s’en tinrent pas là; ils l’étendirent ensuite nue, à plat ventre sur une grande table, ils allumèrent des cierges, ils placèrent l’image de notre sauveur à sa tête et osèrent consommer sur les reins de cette malheureuse le plus redoutable de nos mystères.
De Sade, Les Infortunes de la Vertu
10
It was a Sunday in late May, blue as a bird’s wing. I climbed up the goat-paths to the island’s ridge-back, from where the green froth of the pine-tops rolled two miles down to the coast. The sea stretched like a silk carpet across to the shadowy wall of mountains on the mainland to the west, a wall that reverberated away south, fifty or sixty miles to the horizon, under the vast bell of the empyrean. It was an azure world, stupendously pure, and as always when I stood on the central ridge of the island and saw it before me, I forgot most of my troubles. I walked along the central ridge, westwards, between the two vast views north and south. Lizards flashed up the pine-trunks like living emerald necklaces. There was thyme and rosemary, and other herbs; bushes with flowers like dandelions dipped in sky, a wild, lambent blue.
After a while I came to a place where the ridge fell away south in a small near-precipitous bluff. I always used to sit on the brink there, to smoke a cigarette and survey the immense expanse of sea and mountains. Almost as soon as I sat down, that Sunday, I saw that something in the view had changed. Below me, halfway along the south coast of the island, there was the bay with the three small cottages. From this bay the coast ran on westwards in a series of low headlands and hidden coves. Immediately to the west of the bay with the cottages the ground rose steeply into a little cliff that ran inland some hundreds of yards, a crumbled and creviced reddish wall; as if it was some fortification for the solitary villa that lay on the headland beyond. All I knew of this house was that it belonged to a presumably well-to-do Athenian, who used it only in high summer. Because of an intervening rise in the pine-forest, one could see no more than the flat roof of the place from the central ridge.
But now a thin wisp of pale smoke curled up from the roof. It was no longer deserted. My first feeling was one of resentment, a Crusoe-like resentment, since the solitude of the south side of the island must now be spoilt and I had come to feel possessive about it. It was my secret province and no one else – I permitted the poor fishermen in the three cottages – no one else risen beyond peasant-hood had any right to it. For all that I was curious, and I chose a path that I knew led down to a cove the other side of Bourani, the name of the headland the villa stood on.
The sea and a strip of bleached stones finally shone through the pines. I came to the edge of them. It was a large open cove, a stretch of shingle, the sea as clear as glass, walled by two headlands. On the left and steeper, the eastward one, Bourani, lay the villa hidden in the trees, which grew more thickly there than anywhere else on the island. It was a beach I had been to before two or three times, and it gave, like many of the island beaches, the lovely illusion that one was the very first man that had ever stood on it, that had ever had eyes, that had ever existed, the very first man. There was no sign of anyone from the villa. I installed myself at the more open westward end of the beach, I swam, I ate my lunch of bread, olives and zouzoukakia, fragrant cold meatballs, and I saw no one.
Some time in the early afternoon I walked down the burning shingle to the villa end of the cove. There was a minute whitewashed chapel set back among the trees. Through a crack in the door I saw an overturned chair, an empty candlestand, and a row of naively painted ikons on a small screen. A tarnished paper-gilt cross was pinned on the door. On the back of it someone had scrawled Agios Demetrios – Saint James. I went back to the beach. It ended
in a fall of rocks which mounted rather forbiddingly into dense scrub and trees. For the first time I noticed some barbed wire, twenty or thirty feet from the foot of this slope; the fence turned up into the trees, isolating the headland. An old woman could have got through the rusty strands without difficulty, but it was the first barbed wire I had seen on the island, and I didn’t like it. It insulted the solitude.
I was staring up at the hot, heavy slope of trees, when I had the sensation that I was not alone. I was being looked at. I searched the trees in front of me. There was nothing. I walked a little nearer the rocks above which the wire fence ran through the scrub.
A shock. Something gleamed behind the first rock. It was a blue rubber footfin. Just beyond it, partially in the thin clear shadow of another rock, was the other fin, and a towel. I looked round again, then moved the towel with my foot. A book had been left beneath. I recognized it at once by the cover design: one of the commonest paperback anthologies of modern English verse, which I had myself in my room back at the school. It was so unexpected that I remained staring stupidly down with the idea that it was in fact my own copy, stolen.
It was not mine. The owner had not written his or her name inside, but there were several little slips of plain white paper, neatly cut. The first one I turned to marked a page where four lines had been underscored in red ink; from ‘Little Gidding’.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
The last three lines had an additional mark vertically beside them. I looked up to the dense bank of trees again before I turned to the next little slip of paper. That, and all the other slips, were at pages where there were images or references concerning islands or the sea. There must have been about a dozen of them. Later, that night, I rediscovered a few passages in my own copy.
Each in his little bed conceived of islands…
Where love was innocent, being far from cities.
Those two lines from Auden had been marked, and the two intervening ones not. There were several, also discontinuous, from Ezra Pound.
Come, or the stellar tide will slip away.
Eastward avoid the hour of its decline,
Now! for the needle trembles in my soul! …
Mock not the flood of stars, the thing’s to be.
And this:
Who even dead, yet hath his mind entire!
This sound came in the dark
First must thou go the road
to hell
And to the bower of Ceres’ daughter Proserpine,
Through overhanging dark, to see Tiresias,
Eyeless that was, a shade, that is in hell
So full of knowing that the beefy men know less than he,
Ere thou come to thy road’s end.
Knowledge the shade of a shade,
Yet must thou sail after knowledge
Knowing less than drugged beasts.
The sun-wind, the breeze that blows almost every summer day in the Aegean, sent little waves curling like lazy whips along the shingle. Nothing appeared, everything waited. For the second time that day I felt like Robinson Crusoe.
I put the book back beneath the towel and faced the hill in a rather selfconscious way, convinced by now that I was indeed being watched; then bent down and picked up the towel and the book and put them on top of the rock with the fins, where they would be easier to find if someone came looking for them. Not out of kindness, but to justify my curiosity to the hidden eyes. The towel had a trace of feminine perfume on it; suntan oil.
I went back to where my own clothes were and watched out of the corner of my eye along the beach. After a time I withdrew to the shade of the pine trees behind the beach. The white spot on the rock gleamed in the sun. I lay back and went to sleep. It can’t have been for long. But when I woke up and looked down the beach, the things had gone. The girl, for I’d decided it was a girl, had done her retrieving unseen. I dressed and walked down to the place.
The normal path back to the school was from the middle of the bay. At this end I could see another small path that led up away from the beach where the wire turned. It was steep, and the undergrowth inside the fence was too dense to see through. Small pink heads of wild gladioli flopped out of the shadows, and some warbler in the thickest of the bushes reeled out a resonant, stuttering song. It must have been singing only a few feet from me, with a sobbing intensity, like a nightingale, but much more brokenly. A warning or a luring bird? I couldn’t decide, though it was difficult not to think of it as meaningful. It scolded, fluted, screeched, jug-jugged, entranced.
Suddenly a bell sounded, from some way beyond the undergrowth. The bird stopped singing, and I climbed on. The bell sounded again, three times. It was evidently calling people to some meal, English tea, or perhaps a child was playing with it. After a while the ground levelled out on the back of the headland, and the trees thinned a little, though the undergrowth kept on as thickly as ever.
Then there was a gate, chained and painted. But the paint was peeling, the chain rusty, and a well-worn way had been forced through the wire by the right-hand gatepost. A wide, grassy track led along the headland, seawards and slightly downhill. It curved between the trees and revealed nothing of the house. I listened for a minute, but there was no sound of voices. Down the hill the bird began to sing again.
Then I saw it. I went through the gap. It was two or three trees in, barely legible, roughly nailed high up the trunk of a pine, in the sort of position one sees Trespassers will be prosecuted notices in England. But this notice said, in dull red letters on a white background, salle d’attente. It looked as if years ago it had been taken from some French railway station; some ancient student joke. Enamel had come off and cancerous patches of rusty metal showed through. At one end were three or four of what looked like old bullet holes. It was Mitford’s warning: Beware of the waiting-room.
I stood on the grassy track, in two minds whether to go on to the house, caught between curiosity and fear of being snubbed. I guessed immediately that this was the villa of the collaborationist he had quarrelled with; but I had pictured a shifty, rat-faced Greek Laval rather than someone cultured enough to read, or have guests who could read, Eliot and Auden in the original. I stood so long that I became impatient with my indecision, and forced myself to turn away. I went back through the gap and followed the track up towards the central ridge. It soon petered out into a goat-path, but one that had been recently used, because there were overturned stones that showed earth-red among the sun-bleached greys. When I reached the central ridge, I looked back. From that particular point the house was invisible, but I knew where it lay. The sea and the mountains floated in the steady evening sunshine. It was all peace, elements and void, golden air and mute blue distances, like a Claude; and as I wound down the steep schoolward paths, the northern side of the island seemed oppressed and banal in comparison.
11
The next morning after breakfast I crossed over to Demetriades’s table. He had been in the village the previous evening and I hadn’t bothered to wait up until he returned. Demetriades was small, very plump, frog-faced, a Corfiot, with a pathological dislike of sunshine and the rural. He grumbled incessantly about the ‘disgusting’ provincial life we had to lead on the island. In Athens he lived by night, indulging in his two hobbies, whoring and eating. He spent all his money on these two pursuits and on his clothes, and he ought to have looked sallow and oily and corrupt, but he was always pink and immaculate. His hero in history was Casanova. He lacked the Boswellian charm, to say nothing of the genius, of the Italian, but he was in his alternately gay and lugubrious way better company than Mitford had suggested. And at least he was not a hypocrite. He had the charm of all people who believe implicitly in themselves, that of integration.
I took him out into the garden. His nickname was Méli, or honey. He had a childlike passion for sweet th
ings.
‘Méli, what do you know about the man over at Bourani?’
‘You’ve met him?’
‘No.’
‘Ail’ He shouted petulantly at a boy who was carving a word on an almond tree. The Casanova persona was confined strictly to his private life; in class he was a martinet.
‘You don’t know his name?’
‘Conchis.’ He pronounced the ch hard.
‘Mitford said he had a row with him. A quarrel with him.’
‘He was telling lies. He was always telling lies.’
‘Maybe. But he must have met him.’
‘Po po.’ Po po is Greek for ‘Tell that to the marines.’ ‘That man never sees anyone. Never. Ask the other professors.’
‘But why?’
‘Ech … ‘ He shrugged. ‘Many old stories. I don’t know them.’
‘Come on.’
‘It is not interesting.’