The Magus - John Fowles [231]
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;