The Magus - John Fowles [234]
the incomprehension, the baffled rage of Venice. I had taken myself to be in some way the traitor lago punished, in an unwritten sixth act. Chained in hell. But I was also Venice; the state left behind; the thing journeyed from. The curtains were pulled slowly to. I was left where I had started, in darkness. Even the light behind was extinguished. I had a vertiginous moment in which I doubted whether it had happened. An induced hallucination? Had the trial happened? Had anything ever happened? But the savage pain in my arms told me that everything had happened. And then, out of that pain, the sheer physical torture, I began to understand. I was Iago; but I was also crucified. The crucified lago. Crucified by... the metamorphoses of Lily ran wildly through my brain, like maenads, hunting some blindness, some demon in me down. Not a sixth act, but an act before the first. The seed. The seed of all betrayal. And I comprehended. I suddenly knew her real name, behind the masks of Lily, of Julie, of Artemis, of the doctor, of Desdemona. Why they had chosen the Othello situation. Why Iago. Plunging through that. I knew her real name. I did not forgive, if anything I felt more rage. But I knew her real name. A figure appeared in the door. It was Conchis. He came to where I hung from the frame, and stood in front of me. I closed my eyes. The pain in my arms drowned everything else. I made a sort of groaning-growling noise through the gag. I did not know myself what it really meant to say: whether that I was in pain or that if I ever saw him again I would tear him limb from limb. "I come to tell you that you are now elect." I shook my head violently from side to side. "You have no choice." I still shook my head, but more wearily. He stared at me, with those eyes that seemed older than one man's lifetime, and a little gleam of sympathy came into his expression, as if after all he had put too much pressure on a very thin lever. "Learn to smile, Nicholas. Learn to smile." It came to me that he meant something different by "smile" than I did; that the irony, the humorlessness, the ruthlessness I had always noticed in his smiling was a quality he deliberately inserted; that for him the smile was something essentially cruel, because freedom is cruel, because the freedom that makes us at least partly responsible for what we are is cruel. So that the smile was not so much an _attitude_ to be taken to life as the _nature_ of the cruelty of life, a cruelty we cannot even choose to avoid, since it is human existence. He meant something far stranger by "Learn to smile" than a Smilesian "Grin and bear it." If anything, it meant "Learn to be cruel, learn to be dry, learn to survive." He gave the smallest of bows, one full of irony, of the contempt implicit in incongruous courtesy, then went. As soon as he had gone, Anton came in with Adam and the other blackshirts. They undid the handcuffs and got my arms down. A long black pole two of the blackshirts were carrying was unrolled and I saw a stretcher. They forced me to lie down on it and once again my wrists were handcuffed to the sides. I could neither fight them nor beg them to stop. So I lay passively, with my eyes shut, to avoid seeing them. I smelt ether, felt very faintly the jab of a needle; and I willed the oblivion to come fast.
63
I was staring at a ruined wall. There were a few jagged last patches of plaster but most of it was of rough stones. Many had fallen and lay among crumbling mortar against the foot of the wall. Then I heard, very faintly, the sound of goat bells. For some time I lay there, still too drugged to make the effort of finding where the light I could see the wall by came from; and the sound of the bells, of wind, and of swifts screaming. I was conditioned to be a prisoner. Finally I moved my wrists. They were free. I turned and looked. I could see chinks of light through the roof. There was a broken doorway fifteen feet away; outside, blinding sunlight. I was lying on an air mattress with a rough brown blanket over me. I looked behind. There stood my suitcase, with