Magnus

by Sylvie Germain

Every geometrical form is represented in this variant of Guernica and Coventry…

  Stig Dagerman, German Autumn

  Fragment 12

  A victim of sunstroke, the young man found unconscious on the edge of a cotton field is taken to a hospital in Veracruz. For two days his body and mind are in a sweltering fever. He sweats, he tosses, he raves. But beneath his sun-burnt eyelids, his gaze is fixed, arrested on an image, that of the black mass the woman turned into after twirling round, her back winged with flames. He wishes he could see her face as it was when she was still alive, the face she had in the cellar, in the street in ruins, just before the waltz. He wishes he could rewind the sequence of images, but his memory refuses to. Brought up short by this carbonized body, his memory disintegrates, excoriated and exasperated.

  When at last, by force of tension, his memory restarts it moves the other way, running forward. Out of the dark mass lying in the mud and ashes he sees another woman rise, a stranger dressed in a black suit, her mouth painted red, her ears sparkling. She comes towards him, with her red smile, shining eyes, and crystal flowers glinting in her ears. She bends over him. She smells good. She strokes his head, murmurs words he does not understand but they rustle like foliage, then she takes him gently by the hand and leads him away. He follows her, like a meek little robot, but when the woman tries to make him part with the teddy bear he is clutching under his arm, he escapes from her with piercing screams. She has to submit to letting him keep this ugly relic of his past which she intends to get rid of as soon as she has won the child over.

  ‘Magnus …’ he says, repeating this name several times in an enfeebled voice before he finally opens his eyes. His fever has dropped and slowly he regains consciousness. He sees a woman sitting at his bedside. At first he does not recognize her. She did not appear in his visions. It is May Gleanerstones.

  When the patient arrived at the hospital, all that was found on him was the novel by Juan Rulfo and Terence Gleaner-stones’ visiting card, no other document. So a call was put through to the hotel number written on the card and the Gleanerstones came at once, but they could not provide much information. They only knew the young man’s first name and were not sure of having correctly remembered his family name. They were puzzled to hear this English student speaking German in his delirium. They also thought he occasionally uttered some phrases in yet another language, but were unable to identify it.

  The new book May had given him was already very much the worse for wear. It was obvious from its dog-eared and in some places crumpled pages that it had been handled without care, avidly read and reread. Without any further hesitation she started to read the book herself, her imperfect knowledge of Spanish galvanized by curiosity. The narrative disconcerted her, with no other characters but souls in torment tossed about in the void, interweaving snatches of dialogue, a whirligig of echoes escaped from beyond the grave and wandering like fireflies through Comala’s long sleepless night. ‘Is this how the dead speak to us?’ she wondered. Terence replied indirectly, saying this is how memory speaks to us, in a continuous repetitive undertone, so low, so indistinct, like that of the blood in our veins, we do not hear it. But there are books written in such a way that at times they have the effect on some readers of those big shells you can press against your ear and suddenly hear the sound of your own blood quietly roaring in the conch. The sound of the ocean, the wind, your own heart. Sighs from limbo. Adam has read this book, one that, for others, tells only a strange confused story they cannot get to grips with, and it is as though he had put the book to his ear. A hollowed-out, furrowed, bottomless pit of book in which a plethora of echoes started whispering.

  Unable to wait for the young man to regain consciousness, Terence had to return to San Francisco for business reasons. May stayed behind, feeling close to this stranger lying in a hospital bed. What a peculiar lad though! He saves her life, and the next day puts his own in peril by going out walking, bareheaded, in the sun because he is completely obsessed with a book he has read. However, this book is one she gave him, so she feels partly responsible. Mainly, she is extremely intrigued by this young Englishman. So reserved when they had dinner together, in his delirium he speaks, shouts in other languages. Finally, something she dares not really admit to herself, she is even more attracted to this young man for having seen him fight his demons in bed, his hair damp with sweat, his breathing throaty, as in lovemaking. And she wants to take the place of those demons he had to contend with in his fever, and lie with him on a bed, smell him on her skin, feel the entire weight of his body on her own, hear his heavy breathing on her neck.

  ‘Magnus? Who is Magnus?’ asks May, leaning toward Adam.

  ‘I am,’ he says.

  ‘And Adam? What’s become of him? Has he stayed behind in Comala?’ she continues, sensing the young man has lost himself in the book, but not really knowing whether his mind is still wandering or he is talking sensibly.

  ‘Since you’ve read the novel, you know that Juan Preciado is in fact already dead when the story begins. Well, in my own way I too was dead. Adam Schmalker was a delusion. It was natural he should collapse on the edge of the slope, and evaporate in the sun. It had gone on only too long.’

  This reply leaves her perplexed for she is not sure she quite follows its skewed logic, but she is in no further doubt this decidedly disconcerting young man is in full possession of his wits, indeed that he has acquired greater lucidity in his wandering delirium.

  ‘I have the bizarre impression of understanding what you are going through and at the same not understanding at all,’ she says eventually. ‘When you’re completely recovered I’d like you to explain to me who you are.’

  He smiles with a weary bitter expression for he too, more than anyone else, would like to know who he is. For the time being, he only knows who he is not, never was and will never again believe himself to be: the Dunkeltals’ son. A deliverance. But he feels bereft – of his borrowed name, his false relationship – with the name of a teddy bear for his sole substituted identity. A name that as in the past he assumes for want of a better.

  Magnus. Alias Magnus. By this fanciful designation he decides to enter at last the age of manhood.

  Sequence

  ‘My mother,’ I said. ‘My mother’s dead.’

  ‘So that’s why her voice sounded so weak, as if it had to travel a great distance. Now I understand. And when did that happen, that she died?…

  ‘Oh yes, I came close to being your mother. She never told you anything about that?’

  Juan Rulfo, Pedro Pàramo

  Fragment 13

  Magnus’s body, the smell of his skin, the taste of his lips, the throatiness of his breathing in the climax of love-making – May soon has enjoyment of these pleasures. She falls hopelessly in love with this young man eleven years her junior. It is this difference in age, and the fear he may one day lose interest in her in favour of younger women, that makes her apprehensive, but what she fears most of all is the strength of her physical attraction to him, her insatiable and jealous desire. She feels pinioned by this violent longing for him, enthralled by this unexpected love that has completely taken possession of her. She has always set out to be strong, free from all constraint. She has had many lovers since the day she married Terence at the age of eighteen, but none has ever conquered her in such a way before. She was always able to remain in control of the situation. But now she is defenceless. However, she has enough pride and shrewdness not to betray to Magnus the state of dependence to which he has unwittingly reduced her. With charm and gaiety she does her utmost to retain her allure for him.

  Magnus in fact has no inkling of how hard May is battling against the passion he has aroused in her, and he himself is not allowing full freedom to his own amorous feelings for he cannot envisage a lasting relationship. The Gleanerstones seem to form too close a couple to leave room for anyone else. But these fears of delusion and heartbreak are groundless since Terence is May’s husband in name only. He is a v
ery chaste spouse, she explains with laughter, and very accommodating, because he prefers men, and has affairs only with male lovers. Their marriage is a contract that has satisfied both of them since the outset. A very flexible contract, based on respect and affection, strengthened over the years by a deep mutual understanding. Terence and May are cousins. This marriage offered one of them the cloak of respectability required by his social class, and the other an escape from the family yoke and a freedom she had dreamed of since childhood. While they remain discreet about their short-lived affairs, any new lover who becomes at all important to them is always introduced to the other spouse. If a friendship develops between those two, nothing better; otherwise, the liaison is conducted in private and ends in its own good time without compromising the couple’s relationship with each other. For the past two years Terence has had a companion, Scott, with whom he is very much in love, and for whom May has a very high regard. She explains all this straightforwardly, as if this kind of married relationship were a matter of course. And, at first a little disconcerted, Magnus soon finds that he has a place of complete integrity within this couple at once united and independent of each other.

  He returns to London and May goes with him. It is an opportunity for her to renew her acquaintance with this city and visit friends there. Most of all, she is determined to remain close to Magnus, anxious to know how things will go when he gets back to the uncle and aunt he now knows not to be his relatives, what explanations they will give, and finally what he will decide to do after this encounter. She has suggested he come and live in San Francisco, but without daring to be too insistent.

  The evening of his return to the Schmalkers, Magnus questions Lothar.

  ‘Why did you convince me I was your nephew, and so the son of those people who inflicted themselves on me? Why keep me deceived? Why lie to me all that time?’

  Lothar could deny everything. He could feign incomprehension in the face of the accusatory questions of the young man who insists on being called Magnus from now on. He could hide behind the fact he had broken off all contact with his sister at the time the child must have been born, that he was living in exile when she adopted him, if indeed this were the case. He could pretend to know nothing, or put his accuser in the dock instead, by asking him where he gets this sudden conviction he is not the son of Thea and Clemens Dunkeltal? Who has told him this alleged secret? What proof does he have? But Lothar does not do this. He does not want to. The moment he had been expecting, but was constantly putting off as he so dreaded it, all of a sudden has arrived. The moment to admit finally to a lie perpetuated by inordinate discretion.

  Yes, he knew. He had known for a long time his sister was barren, and no fertility treatment had been able to reverse this. Her younger brothers had taken the place of sons. It was after their death that the idea of adopting a child had developed, become an obsession with her. When the opportunity presented itself she seized it, for the first time ever defying her husband, who had no desire whatsoever to take in any foundling, and felt all the more reluctant to do so having just fathered a son, illegitimate admittedly but nonetheless his. To what extent Thea was aware of Clemens’ infidelity, Lothar could not tell. She had always expended so much energy in denying anything that might upset her, interfere with her exalted vision of the world, she might have deliberately closed her eyes to that as well.

  But the story of this adoption, explains Lothar, he only heard about later when his sister after some fifteen years’ silence wrote asking him to come to Friedrichshafen. She knew she had not much longer to live, and she was concerned about her son. For despite everything, she thought of him as her son and she had loved him. But she had no one to whom she could entrust this child; her close family were dead, her friends had gone their separate ways, and she had managed to isolate herself completely. Then she remembered her elder brother, the brother she had insulted when he opposed the regime, whom she had despised when he married a young woman of Jewish origin, then regarded as a traitor when he emigrated to an enemy country. But it was not only because she had no one else to turn to that she appealed to him, but because she had no doubt he would respond to her appeal. That he would respond immediately, and would undertake without fail the mission she wanted him to accomplish. Her animosity towards Lothar notwithstanding, her trust in him remained intact, and as death neared, it came to the fore again. Whether or not the child should be told the truth, she left it up to Lothar to decide. Even this lie, which after all she had meticulously and doggedly constructed, a lie she had jealously protected, was something she no longer cared about. She no longer cared about anything, had lost the will to fight, the desire to live, the strength to love or hate. She had no expectations, of either forgiveness or pity from anyone, no hopes whatsoever, she believed in nothing. She had plumbed the depths of despair and was preparing to die in a state of total indifference towards herself. Passing into nothingness, that was all. Only the future of this adoptive son, of whose origins she knew nothing except that he had survived the bombing of a city, still mattered to her, and only the brother she had violently rejected seemed worthy of trust. Thea had lived her life from beginning to end ruled by a mixture of paradoxes and convictions as unshakeable as they were arbitrary, without ever questioning her position.

  So Lothar was free to tell the child the truth, yet he had not done so, having never considered the time was right. And not a word of this truth – in any case an incomplete truth since no one knew the child’s real identity – had he breathed to anybody, not even his wife Hannelore or his daughters, for fear of adding to the deceit by sharing it with others without the knowledge of the person concerned. And indeed, he asks the young man how he discovered this secret. Who could possibly have told him? What happened in Mexico? But Magnus is unable to offer any explanation. How can he say, without being taken for a lunatic, ‘It was the earth that told me. The earth, the insects, the sun’? He says simply, ‘I just know, that’s all.’

  And indeed that is all he knows. The disclosure imparted to him remains incomplete, only the lie about his childhood illness and his falsified parentage has been brought out into the open and confirmed, but he is still in the dark, even more than before, about who he is and where he comes from. He retrieves from the cupboard the teddy bear he had wrapped up and put away. He unwraps it and places it on his lap. He notices the handkerchief he had tied over the diamond eyes is wet through. He unties the handkerchief and discovers the diamonds have lost all their brilliance; they are covered with a rough greyish frosting. This frosting is seeping dampness, like a patch of saltpetre that forms on the wall of a cave. He pulls off the eyes clouded with this film of grey tears, stuffs them into his pocket, and replaces them with the little buttercups that he sews back on. The teddy bear is restored to the way it used to look, with its expression of mild bewilderment. But it has no new revelation to offer the person it once protected and for so long accompanied, still providing only the name it wore tied round its neck, the cotton-thread letters now bleached of colour through exposure to the acidity of the diamond tears.

  Magnus is twenty years old (but when exactly was he born, and where?) and a quarter of his life is lost in oblivion, all the rest tainted by a long-lasting fraud.

  He is twenty years old, and he is a stranger to himself, an anonymous young man overburdened with memory, lacking however in the essential: his ancestry. A young man crazed with memory and forgetting, who juggles with his uncertainties in various languages, none of which, perhaps, is his mother tongue.

  He informs Lothar and Hannelore of his decision to leave England and to go and live in the United States. On the eve of his departure he walks along the banks of the Thames and throws the unseeing diamonds into the water. The handkerchief he has washed. It is now no more than a square of cotton thinner than a sheet of paper, translucid, of a yellowed white. He has tied it round the bear’s neck again.

  Echo

  My mother … my mother’s dead … her voice … so weak … ha
d to travel a great distance … distance … distance…

  Now I understand … And when …? when …? when …? did that happen, that she died …? she died …? she died…?

  Fragment 14

  Here begins the story of Magnus. Here, somewhere between San Francisco, New York, Montreal, Los Angeles, and Vancouver, and many other cities besides. May Gleanerstones is a dedicated theatre-goer. She works as a drama critic for several magazines and newspapers, and is always ready to travel thousands of kilometres to seek out new works. Magnus often accompanies her on these trips. Terence is an art dealer and also travels frequently.

  Together with Scott, they form a family of four, bound by unconventional ties that interweave without tangling, in which love is declined in the mood of desire and friendship.

  Magnus soon adapts to this new way of life of being continually on the move. May is the figurehead of a free ship that sets sail whenever the fancy takes it and adapts easily to prevailing conditions. Thanks to her he finally shrugs off his ghosts, leaves his past behind. The horizon now opens before him, no longer gaping behind him like a black hole. But as much averse as May is to being in any way dependent, especially financially, he takes up translation, translating articles for art magazines, technical publications, essays. His work is irregular, but it suits him because it allows him great freedom of movement.

  On three occasions, however, those ghosts reintrude on his life: the first time shortly after moving to San Francisco, at dinner in a restaurant one evening with the Gleanerstones and Scott, when Terence suddenly interrupts the conversation and says to May and Magnus in a low voice, ‘Listen to the people at the table behind us. Listen carefully …’ They pay attention, Scott too. The guests at the table behind them are speaking in a harsh-sounding language. Magnus shrugs his shoulders slightly as a sign of incomprehension. May frowns, concentrating hard. ‘It reminds me of something, but what?’