Pascali's Island (20 page)

Again, as on that first evening, the evening of our meeting, I picture Mister Bowles in his room. He will stand at his window, looking out at the nightfall. How, I wonder, did he become what he is? Natural delinquency or some process of disillusionment? Perhaps he discovered his gift by accident, as I discovered mine. I feel we are kindred spirits. Passionate and fraudulent Mister Bowles. Mon semblable, mon frère. How will he keep his bearings in this sudden descent of night? Here in the Levant, darkness comes too soon for the stranger, comes before he has time to create his night-time being. Will Mister Bowles be caught unawares before there is time for the stiff upper lip? It is not like the gradual English nightfall, Excellency, that I have read of in their poets but never seen, resignation coming with the waning light, the waverings of gnats, the last songs of birds. There the heart is given time to attune itself, to find some form of pensiveness or melancholy, not unpleasing. In England they are schooled in this gentle stoicism, but how does he feel here, with darkness imposed like a gesture almost, gesture of extinction? I see him for these few minutes at the window, overtaken by darkness, with the crooked line of his past behind him and the short straight line in front. He stands there, aware of aspirations disappointed, ambitions unfulfilled. And now just one ambition, simple and immense.

Excellency, I know what terra rossa is. And with that knowledge other things have fallen into place. But I must deal first with Mister Bowles.

I went straight to his room. He was there before me, as I expected, but it could not have been much before, because when he opened his door I saw signs of chaos and confusion behind him, saw it even before entering, clothes on the floor, a chest of drawers with gaping apertures where the drawers should have been. He had not had time to put this in order. Where had he been then, while I had been writing, sleeping, writing? He must have left the site well before dark.

'Yes,' he said, no doubt seeing my eyes widen. 'Someone has been having a jolly good look at my possessions. Come in, anyway. It will not take long to put things to rights.'

I sat on the bed, watched him bundle clothes back into drawers, into the wardrobe. 'Is anything missing?' I said.

'Not as far as I can see. There's nothing much here except for a few clothes. I always travel light, you know.'

'Except for marble heads,' I said.

Mister Bowles paused in his tidying, and looked at me. 'H'm, yes,' he said. 'But that was necessary.' No slightest sign of a smile on his face. He seems almost totally lacking in humour. Perhaps it is just this deficiency that makes him so successful as a trickster. But it is not enough to explain his unnerving air of being always justified. 'They must think I'm an absolute idiot,' he said.

'Why?' At this moment, by a fortunate chance, I leaned forward on the bed and as I did so I glanced down and saw the little notebook with shiny black covers lying just underneath.

'To think I would leave anything valuable lying about in my room,' he said.

He could not yet have realised it was there. Otherwise, I reasoned, he would immediately have retrieved it. Casually I moved a-little along the bed. The diary was now within reach of my foot. 'Probably Izzet, or some of his minions,' I said. 'They will be trying to find out if you have taken anything of value from the site.'

'I suppose so,' he said. 'They stopped me and searched me as I was coming back today. The two soldiers stationed above the site. I don't think they knew what they were looking for. In any case, it is quite absurd. They can't see the site itself, nor a good part of the ground below it. There are a thousand hiding places there.'

'It is more serious than you seem to think,' I said. 'They won't wait much longer. Your life is in danger. Mine too.'

Mister Bowles was crouching at the chest of drawers with his back to me. I extended my foot, kicked the diary towards me, bent down, picked it up. I had no time to do more than slip it behind my back, before Mister Bowles looked round at me. 'I'm a British subject,' he said.

'You are as liable as any other subject to die of a knife between the ribs,' I said. 'Take my advice before it is too late. Let them have the papers back on the terms they have offered.'

He straightened and turned to face me. 'And the statue?' he said. 'You don't understand. I have a responsibility now.'

Excellency, I cannot describe the earnestness, the conviction, with which he said these words. I heard in them the final death-knell of all my hopes. It was at this point, I think, that the idea of betraying Mister Bowles began to germinate in my mind, though it is difficult to be precise about beginnings – the seed had no doubt been dormant there a long time, waiting for the right weather, the right blend of fear and disappointment. 'But our deal,' I said. 'The agreement… what about that? It is all over, then?'

'Not at all,' Mister Bowles said. 'All I need is a day or two longer, that's all. That's where you come in, actually. Look, let me tell you how I came to find the statue, then maybe you'll see…'

'All right,' I said.

'I'm going to have a glass of beer and a sandwich up here in my room,' he said. 'Would you like to join me?'

In accents I took care not to make too delighted, I assented to this. He rang the bell and Biron appeared almost at once. The sandwiches were ordered, salami for me, cheese for Mister Bowles. While this was going on I managed to transfer the diary from the bed behind me to my side pocket. Biron was polite and attentive, but he did not look at me, he did not look into my face, either then or when he returned with the food and drink.

'I have been wanting to talk to someone about it,' Mister Bowles said, as soon as Biron had gone.

Over the beer and the sandwiches, he told me about it, told me in that halting, curiously compelling way of his, with blurts of eloquence and self-revelation. I shall give his own words where they seem particularly vivid or revealing. But for the most part I shall use oratio oblique. In short, Excellency, what follows is Mister Bowles's story transmuted into art. It will help towards the effect, however, if you will try to picture Mister Bowles himself, sitting opposite to me, face dark red from the sun, pale eyes glinting, hair smooth and neat in the lamplight.

He had decided, he said, to pay one last visit to the site, before selling back the lease. To have a last look round, he explained, and complete his notes: 'For the book I am writing, you know.'

That he should persist with this story of a book surprised me at the time. But then, of course, it is more than a story, much more. I am coming to understand him. I am sure that his interest in the putative abodes of the putative Virgin is quite genuine. His claim to be writing a book, though I feel sure no words of it have yet been written, is no mere falsehood; the book has that degree of existence fantasy can lay claim to, which is considerable – I speak as one who knows, veteran of many solitary triumphs. No he is not a liar, he is an accomplished fantasist, and like all such – like myself, Excellency – both victim and exploiter. All the same, an uneasy doubt remains. Did he really go back there, in the hot afternoon, to write non-existent notes for a non-existent book? With Izzet and the Pasha in the net, and payment only a few hours off? Certain it is that something took him back there – if not I should have had my money, should have been in Constantinople now.

Nothing much of the villa was left standing, only a single arch and a broken wall. (It was in a cavity below this arch, if you remember, Excellency, that he claimed to have found the objects he showed to Mahmoud Pasha and Izzet.) However, the ground plan was still there to be seen, and he had begun a methodical examination of the site, noting the details. 'I could hear the lizards,' he said, 'slithering about among the stones while I was working.'

Straightening up from his measurements he had seen, in the face of the rock behind the villa, small rectangular niches, obviously cut by hand, blackened inside, presumably by the flames of devotional lamps. 'I have seen the same sort of thing in wayside shrines,' he said. Generations of people had come here to light lamps or candles. Prayers and promises uttered in that remote place, from lips long dead. 'I noted it,' he said. 'It was evidence, of a kind. Popular beliefs have to be taken into account, you know.' Also, he had thought it the kind of personal detail that goes down well in a book.

Behind the villa the terrain was very irregular, strewn with masonry half-overgrown, mounded with heaps of reddish earth. It was clear, he said, that there had been considerable subsidence of the land here, though not very recently. He had made his way over this, seeking to trace signs of outbuildings, and he had come eventually to the edge of a roughly circular declivity, steep-sided, scattered with rocks and scrub. 'I don't really know why I went down there,' he said. It wasn't as if there were any visible signs of habitation. 'There was nothing there,' he said. 'It was impulse, pure impulse.'

There was in his manner now a new, and disturbing, quality of intensity. It was clear that he was in the grip of his own story. His eyes no longer regarded me closely, but looked at some point midway between us, with a great effort of concentration. It was as if he was in fear of being swamped, rendered incoherent, by the sheer marvellousness of what he was relating.

The cicadas shrilled with what seemed increasing volume all round him, but not, somehow, he said, in the hollow itself, once he began the descent – they seemed to stop on the edge of the slope, so that the afternoon was both loud and silent. He looked around a bit down there, saw nothing of interest, and was about to leave when, again on impulse, pure impulse – he stressed this, Excellency – he had walked over and forced a way through the tangle of scrub that grew against the foot of the slope. Nothing there but the same reddish earth and grey limestone -or such at least was his first impression-and he was in the act of turning away, when something glimpsed there, some intimation only half-conscious, registered as it were on the retinue of the mind, caused him to look again, more closely.

Then he saw what he had seen before, but now with full awareness.

It was at first like a curiously curved spur of rock embedded in the hillside, outer edge of some much greater mass. He might have assumed it to be no more that this. He said, 'I might have left it, even then,' and his eyes were stark at the thought of that appalling possibility. However, something more than accidental about that curving line had come home to him – it was, after all, what had made him look again: the impossibility of the shape being a merely random formation. 'There was something necessary about it,' he said. He looked at me anxiously, for understanding, for the charity of understanding. 'In the last analysis,' he said, 'there is no resemblance between the forms in nature and the human form, none at all.' I mentioned the gnarled shapes olive trees sometimes assume, the way the sea will sculpt human-seeming reclinations in the rocks of the shore. 'No, no,' he said impatiently. 'There is no necessity about any of these things. That is my whole point. That is what I saw. Those other things you mention, rocks and trees and so forth, they are… obedient. What I saw in that line was something urgent. It is quite different, you see.' He was excited at the force of the distinction he was making. He did not want me to discuss it with him, only to understand his feelings, see the wonder.

So he had stepped closer, taking care not to damage the screening bushes – you see, he was already thinking of concealment, Excellency. He looked closely at it, touched it: it was rounded, smooth beneath the flaking clay. It came to him then that this was a human arm.

He shivered, he told me, in spite of the heat in that enclosure. There was something deeply disturbing, unnerving almost, in the discovery that something in the human image might be trapped there. This passed, and a feeling of excitement rose in him. He moved his fingers slowly along the curve. More clay flaked away, allowing him to feel the rounded solidity beneath. There was not enough of the arm exposed yet to establish the dimensions, so he tried removing some of the earth at the sides, but it was packed hard, too hard for his fingers. He climbed out of the enclosure and returned to the area of the ruins, where he found a sharp fragment of marble. Armed with this he returned, and there, in that screened and secret hollow, he set to work, scraping slowly at the earth, carefully prising it away from the form beneath.

After a while he stood back. He was looking at the shape of a naked human forearm, life-size, fashioned in metal-bronze it could only be. From the angle of this, he judged that the body to which it was attached was half-turned inward, into the hillside.

'Amazing,' Mister Bowles said. 'You have no idea how strange it was, seeing it there like that. It was as if it was struggling, itself, to get out.'

He had been obliged to leave it at this point, though he did not say why. He could not stay any longer, he said – there was no time. He had made no attempt to conceal things. In any case, he said, it was not visible, so far at least, from the floor of the hollow. Only someone who did as he had done, forced through the scrub, would have been able to see it. 'That's the whole point, you see,' he said. 'No one would normally… I myself… I was led to it.' So he had left it and clambered up again, out of that charmed place.

He had been surprised, he said, momentarily, when he got out into the open and could see the sea again, to find that everything looked unchanged. 'I tell you,' he said, 'I expected the sea or the hills or something in the landscape to be different, changed, after that. You probably think that's funny…'

'No,' I said, 'I understand it very well.'

'It was such a wonderful experience, you see. The way I was directed to it, you know. I haven't been able to describe it properly. I went back again today – you saw me there. But it is slow work. I am afraid of damaging him.'

'So you knew,' I said, 'that same evening – when you sent the note?'

'Oh, yes. That's why I mentioned the soldiers. They were there, you know, two of them, actually on the site, just a bit higher up from the villa.'