The Magus - John Fowles [38]
and we lifted the frame down. He tilted it for me to see. On the back were the first few lines of a sketch for another painting, then scrawled across the lower half of the untreated canvas were some illegible words with numbers beside them, added up at the bottom, by the stretcher. "Debts. That one there." _Toto_. "Toto was the Algerian he bought his hashish from." He pointed: _Zbo_. "Zborowski." I stared down at those careless, drunken scrawls; felt the immediacy of the man, and the terrible but necessary alienation of genius from ordinariness. A man who would touch you for ten francs; and go home and paint what would one day be worth ten million. Conchis watched me. "This is the side the museums never show." "Poor devil." "He would say the same of us. With much more reason." I helped him put the frame back. Then he made me look at the windows. They were rather small and narrow, arched, each one with a centre pillar and a capital of carved marble. "These come from Monemvasia. I found them built into a cottage. So I bought the cottage." "Like an American." He did not smile. "They are Venetian. Of the fifteenth century." He turned to the bookshelves and pulled down an art book. "Here." I looked over his shoulder and saw Fra Angelico's famous _Annunciation_; and at once knew why the colonnade outside had seemed so familiar. There was even the same whiteedged floor of red tiles. "Now what else can I show you? My harpsichord is very rare. It is one of the original Pleyels. Not in fashion. But very beautiful." He stroked its shining black top, as if it were a cat. There was a music stand on the far side, by the wall. It seemed an unnecessary thing to have with a harpsichord. "You play some other instrument, Mr. Conchis?" He looked at it, shook his head. "No. It has sentimental value." But he sounded quite unsentimental. He looked at his watch. "Now, I must leave you for some time. I have letters to write. You will find newspapers and magazines over there. Or books--take what you want. You will excuse me? Your room is upstairs... if you wish?" "No, this is fine. Thank you." He went; and I stared again at the Modigliani, caressed the Rodin, surveyed the room. I felt rather like a man who has knocked on a cottage door and found himself in a palace; vaguely foolish. I took a pile of the French and American magazines that lay on a table in the corner and went out under the colonnade. After a while I did something else I hadn't done for several months. I began to rough out a poem. _From this skull-rock strange golden roots throw_ _Ikons and incidents; the man in the mask_ _Manipulates. I am the fool that falls_ _And never learns to wait and watch,_ _Icarus eternally damned, the dupe of time..._ He suggested we look over the rest of the house. A door led into a bare, ugly hall. There was a dining room, which he said he never used, on the north side of the house, and another room which resembled nothing so much as a secondhand-book shop; a chaos of books--shelves of books, stacks of books, piles of magazines and newspapers, and one large and evidently newly arrived parcel that lay unopened on a desk by the window. He turned to me with a pair of callipers in his hand. "I am interested in anthropology. May I measure your skull?" He took my permission for granted, and I bent my head. As he gently pinched my head, he said, "You like books?" He seemed to have forgotten, but perhaps he hadn't, that I had read English at Oxford. "Of course." "What do you read?" He wrote down my measurements in a little notebook. "Oh... novels mainly. Poetry. And criticism." "I have not a single novel here." "No?" "The novel is no longer an art form." I grinned. "Why do you smile?" "It was a sort of joke when I was at Oxford. If you didn't know what to say at a party, you used to ask a question like that." "Like what?" "'Do you think the novel is exhausted as an art form?' No serious answer was expected." "I see. It was not serious." "Not at all." I looked at the notebook. "Are my measurements interesting?" "No." He dismissed that. "Well--I am serious. The novel