The Magus - John Fowles [253]
in the depths. "A fellow. Not a victim." "I simply wanted to compare notes." He paused, then said, "The essence of... his... system is surely that you learn not to 'compare notes." He made the phrase sound repellent; cheap. His wanting me to go was all but spoken. I stole a look at him. "Would you be here now if..." "A lift on the road one has already long been travelling explains when. Not why." "Our experiences must have varied very widely." "Why should they be similar? Are you a Catholic?" I shook my head. "A Christian even?" I shook my head again. He shrugged. He had dark shadows under his eyes, as if he was tired. "But I do believe in... charity?" "My dear man, you don't want charity from me. You want confessions I am not prepared to make. In my view I am being charitable in not making them. In my position you would understand." He added, "And at my remove you will understand." His voice was set cold; there was a silence. He said, "I'm sorry. You force me to be more brusque than I wish." "I'd better go." He seized his chance, and stood up. "I intend nothing personal." "Of course." "Let me see you to the gate." We walked back; into the whitewashed door carved through the rock, up past doors that were like prison cells, and out into the hall with the death murals. He said, "I meant to ask you about the school. There was a boy called Aphendakis, very promising. I coached him." We lingered a little in the loggia, beside the Peruginos, exchanging sentences about the school. I could see that he was not really interested, was merely making an effort to be pleasant; to humiliate his pride. But even in that he was self-conscious. We shook hands. He said, "This is a great European shrine. And we are told that our visitors--whatever their beliefs--should leave it feeling... I think the words are 'refreshed and consoled." He paused as if I might want to object, to sneer, but I said nothing. "I must ask you once again to believe that I am silent for your sake as well as mine." "I'll try to believe it." He gave a formal sort of bow, more Italian than English; and I went down the rock staircase to the path through the ilexes. I had to wait till evening in Subiaco for a bus back. It ran through long green valleys, under hilltop villages, past aspens already yellowing into autumn. The sky turned through the softest blues to a vesperal amber-pink. Old peasants sat at their doorways; some of them had Greek faces, inscrutable, noble, at peace. I felt, perhaps because I had drunk almost a whole bottle of Verdicchio while I waited, that I belonged, and would forever belong, to an older world than Leverrier's. I didn't like him, or his religion. And this not liking him, this halfdrunken love of the ancient, unchangeable Greco-Latin world seemed to merge. I was a pagan, at best a stoic, at worst a voluptuary, and would remain forever so. Waiting for the train, I got more drunk. A man at the station bar managed to make me understand that an indigo-blue hilltop under the lemon-green sky to the west was where the poet Horace had had his farm. I drank to the Sabine hill; better one Horace than ten thousand Saint Benedicts; better one poem than ten thousand sermons. Much later I realised that perhaps Leverrier, in this case, would have agreed; because he too had chosen exile; because there are times when silence is a poem.
69
If Rome, a city of the vulgar living, had been depressing after Greece, London, a city of the drab dead, was fifty times worse. I had forgotten the innumerability of the place, its ugliness, its termite density after the sparsities of the Aegean. It was like mud after diamonds, dank undergrowth after sunlit marble; and as the airline bus crawled on its way through that endless suburb that lies between Northolt and Kensington I wondered why anyone should, or could, ever return of his own free will to such a landscape, such a society, such a climate. Flatulent white clouds drifted listlessly in a grey-blue sky; and I could hear people saying "Lovely day, isn't it?" But all those tired greens, greys, browns... they seemed to