Lily. Or was it her sister? Had I ever known which was which? What they were, their identities, receded, interwove, flowed into mystery, into distorting shadows and currents, like objects sinking away, away, down through shafted depths of water.
The black arch of his long back, his loins joined to hers. White separated knees. That terrible movement, total possession between those acquiescent knees. Something carried me back to that night incident when she played Artemis; to the strange whiteness of Apollo’s skin. The dull gold crown of leaves. An athletic body, living marble. And I knew then that Apollo and Anubis had been played by the same man. That night, their vanishing into the black pines. The next day’s innocent virgin on the beach. The black doll swung in my mind, the skull grinned malevolently. Artemis, Artemis, eternal liar.
He silently celebrated his orgasm.
The two bodies lay absolutely still on the altar of the bed. His turned-away head was hidden by hers, and I could see her hands caressing his shoulders, his back. I tried to wrench my aching arms free of the frame, to overturn it. But it had been lashed to the wall, to special staples; and the rings were bolted through the wood.
After an unendurable pause he rose from the bed, knelt and kissed her shoulder, almost formally, and then went swiftly back to where he had come from. She lay for a moment as he had left her, crushed back among the cushions. But then she raised herself on her left elbow and lay posed as she had at the beginning. Her stare fixed me. Without rancor and without regret; without triumph and without evil; as Desdemona once looked back on Venice.
On 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 a number of things on it: a Thermos, a brown-paper packet, cigarettes and matches, a black box like a jewelry case, an envelope.
I sat up and shook my head. Then I threw the blanket aside and went unevenly over the uneven floor to the door. I was at the top of a hill. Before me stretched a vast downward slope of ruins. Hundreds of stone houses, all ruined, most of them no more than gray heaps of rubble, decayed fragments of gray wall. Here and there were slightly less dilapidated dwellings; the remnants of second floors, windows that framed sky, black doorways. But what was so extraordinary was that this whole tilted city of the dead seemed to be floating in midair, a thousand feet above the sea that surrounded it. I looked at my watch. It was still going; just before five. I clambered on top of a wall and looked round. In the direction in which the late afternoon sun lay I could see a mountainous mainland stretching far to the south and north. I seemed to be on top of some gigantic promontory, absolutely alone, the last man on earth, between sea and sky in some medieval Hiroshima. And for a moment I did not know if hours had passed, or whole civilizations.
A fierce wind blew out of the north.
I returned inside the room and carried the suitcase and other things out into the sunshine. First of all I looked at the envelope. It contained my passport, about ten pounds in Greek money, and a typewritten sheet of paper. Three sentences. “There is a boat to Phraxos at 11:30 tonight. You are in the Old City at Monemvasia. The way down is to the southeast.” No date, no signature. I opened the Thermos: coffee. I poured myself a full capful and swallowed it; then another. The packet contained sandwiches. I began to eat, with the same feeling I had had that morning, of intense pleasure in the taste of coffee, the taste of bread, of cold lamb sprinkled with oregano and lemon juice.
But added to this now was a feeling, to which the great airy landscape contributed, of release, of having survived; a euphoria, a buoyancy and resilience. Above all there was the extraordinariness of the experience; its uniqueness conferred a uniqueness on me, and I had it like a great secret, a journey to Mars, a prize no one else had. Then too I seemed to see my own behavior, I had woken up seeing it, in a better light; the trial and the disintoxication were evil fantasies sent to test my normality, and my normality had triumphed. They were the ones who had been finally humiliated—and I saw that perhaps that astounding last performance had been intended to be a mutual humiliation. While it happened it had seemed like a vicious twisting of the dagger in an already sufficient wound; but now I saw it might also be a kind of revenge given me for their spying, their voyeurism, on Alison and myself.