by John Fowles
I saw at once that the choice they were offering me was absurd. Everything was fixed to make it impossible for me to punish Lily. The only punishment I wanted to inflict on her was to make her cry forgiveness; not cry pain. In any case I knew that even if I put my thumb down, they would find some way of stopping me. The whole situation, with all its gratuitously sadistic undertones, was a trap; a false dilemma. Even then, through all my seething resentment and anger at being so mercilessly exposed in the village stocks, I had a feeling that was certainly not forgiveness of them, even less gratitude, but a recrudescence of that amazement I had felt so often before: that all this could be mounted just for me.
Not without hesitation, thinking, gauging whether I was free to choose, and feeling sure that this was not a preconditioning, I turned my thumb down.
The old man stared at me a long moment, then signed to the guards and went back to the group. My wrists were freed. I stood up and rubbed them, then tore the gag off. The tape ripped at the stubble on my chin, and for a moment all I could do was blink foolishly with pain. The guards made no move. I rubbed the skin round my mouth, and looked round the room.
Silence. They expected me to speak; so I would not speak.
I went down the wooden steps and picked up the cat. I had half expected it to be a stage property. But it was surprisingly heavy. The handle, of plaited leather over wood; a knop end. The thongs were worn, the knots as hard as bullets. The thing looked old, a genuine Royal Navy antique from the Napoleonic wars. As I handled it, I calculated. The most likely solution was that they would put the lights out; there would be a scuffle. The four men and Adam were by the door and it would be impossible to escape.
Without warning I picked up the cat and swung it down on the table. A savage hiss. The thrash of the lashes on the deal table-top sounded like a gun. It made one or two of the students jump. I saw one of them, a girl, look away. Yet no one moved nearer. I began to walk towards where Lily was. I did not expect to get to her.
But I did. Still no one moved, I was suddenly within hitting range and the nearest person was thirty feet away. I stood as if measuring my distance, with my left foot forward, turned to strike. I even gave the beastly thing a little testing reach, so that the thongs brushed the middle of her back. Her face was hidden by the head-protector. I swung the cat back over my shoulder, as if I was going to swing it down with all my force on that white back. I half expected a shout to ring out, to see or hear someone dash for me. But no one moved and I knew, as they must have known, that it would have been too late. Only a bullet could have stopped me. I looked round, half expecting to see a gun. But the eleven, the guards, the ‘students’, all stood immobile.
I looked back at Lily. There was a very real devil in me, an evil marquis, that wanted to strike, to see the wet red weals traverse the delicate skin; not so much to hurt her as to shock them, to bring them to a sense of the enormity of what they were doing; almost of the enormity of making her risk so much. ‘Anton’ had said it: Very brave. I knew they must be absolutely certain of my decency, my stupid English decency; in spite of all they had said, all the bandillera they had planted in my self-esteem, absolutely sure that not once in a hundred thousand years would I bring that cat down. I did bring it down then, but very slowly, as if making sure of my distance again, then took it back. I tried to determine whether once again I was preconditioned not to do it, by Conchis; but I knew I had absolute freedom of choice. I could do it if I wanted.
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 infinitesimally. 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 the 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 offered. 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.
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 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
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 synchronized, like early silent film. Another flickering 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.
A buck nigger and
a white woman.
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.
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 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 began 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 recognize, though it looked American. Cro
wded 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 would now have bet that it was not Lily’s.
The invitation.