Free The Magus by John Fowles Page A

scribo, pingo, ergo sum. For days after I felt myself filled with nothingness; with something more than the old physical and social loneliness – a metaphysical sense of being marooned. It was something almost tangible, like cancer or tuberculosis.
    Then one day, not a week later, it was tangible: I woke up one morning and found I had two sores. I had been half expecting them. In late February I had gone to Athens, and paid another visit to the house in Kephissia. I knew I had taken a risk. At the time it hadn’t seemed to matter.
    For a day I was too shocked to act. There were two doctors in the village: one active, who had the school in his practice, and one, a taciturn old Rumanian, who though semi-retired still took a few patients. The school doctor was in and out of the common-room continually. I couldn’t go to him. So I went to see Dr Patarescu.
    He looked at the sores, and then at me, and shrugged.
    ‘Felicitations,’ he said.
    ‘C’est …’
    ‘On va voir ça à Athènes. Je vous donnerai une adresse. C’est bien à Athènes que vous l.avez attrapé, oui?’ I nodded. ‘Les poules là-bas. Infectes. Seulement les fous qui s’y laissent prendre.’
    He had an old yellow face and pince-nez; a malicious smile. My questions amused him. The chances were I could be cured; I was not contagious but I must have no sex, he could have treated me if he had had the right drug, benzathine penicillin, but he could not get it. He had heard one could get it at a certain private clinic in Athens, but I would have to pay through the nose; it would be eight weeks before we could be sure it had worked. He answered all my questions drily; all he could offer was the ancient arsenic and bismuth treatment, and I must in any case have a laboratory test first. He had long ago been drained of all sympathy for humanity, and he watched me with tortoise eyes as I put down the fee.
    I stood in his doorway, still foolishly trying for his sympathy.
    ‘Je suis maudit.’
    He shrugged, and showed me out, totally indifferent, a sere notifier of what is.
    It was too horrible. There was still a week to the end of term, and I thought of leaving at once and going back to England. Yet I couldn’t bear the idea of London, and there was a sort of anonymity in Greece, if not on the island. I didn’t really trust Dr Patarescu; one or two of the older masters were his cronies and I knew they often saw him for whist. I searched every smile, every word spoken to me, for a reference to what had happened; and I thought that the very next day I saw in various eyes a certain dry amusement. One morning during break the headmaster said, ‘Cheer up, kyrios Urfe, or we shall say the beauties of Greece have made you sad.’ I thought this was a direct reference; and the smiles that greeted the remark seemed to me to be more than it merited. Within three days of seeing the doctor I decided that everyone knew about my disease, even the boys. Every time they whispered I heard the word ‘syphilis’.
    Suddenly, in that same terrible week, the Greek spring was with us. In only two days, it seemed, the earth was covered with anemones, orchids, asphodels, wild gladioli; for once there were birds everywhere, on migration. Undulating lines of storks croaked overhead, the sky was blue, pure, the boys sang, and even the sternest masters smiled. The world around me took wing, and I was stuck to the ground; a Catullus without talent forced to inhabit a land that was Lesbia without mercy. I had hideous nights, in one of which I wrote a long letter to Alison, trying to explain what had happened to me, how I remembered what she had said in her letter in the canteen, how now I could believe her; how I loathed myself. Even then I managed to sound resentful, for my leaving her began to seem like the last and the worst of my bad gambles. I might have married her; at least I should have had a companion in the desert.
    I did not post the letter, but again and again, night after