Magnus

by Sylvie Germain

  He contents himself with questioning the bear with the buttercup eyes that patiently keeps vigil on a shelf in the darkness of his wardrobe: a silent questioning, suited to the teddy bear with the slightly squashed nose and crinkled ears.

  Magnus talks to Magnus, wordlessly, soundlessly, senselessly.

  It is only several months after his return to London that he sees Peggy Bell again. She has finally found a way to put some distance on a long-term basis between herself and her homeland, where she continues to feel trapped in the widowhood that came on her too suddenly, too devastatingly: by accepting a job as an English teacher at a school in Vienna. And before moving to Austria she wants to learn a little German. Else has suggested she get in touch with Magnus. This proposal takes him by surprise and above all raises misgivings, for he has never taught his mother tongue, which in any case he still suspects might not actually be his first language, and which he only uses with the Schmalkers, Lothar preferring to talk with him in German. But his relationship with the language remains so ambiguous that an equally tortuous idea occurs to him: he tells himself that by teaching it to someone else, who herself is anxious to evade a too painful memory, he will succeed in smashing the matrix of gloom and chilliness rigidifying the words, and give them a new sound.

  They are both on time to meet as arranged in a café, and are waiting, seated at different tables. Neither has recognized the other. They eventually identify each other by the way they both keep looking towards the door every time it opens to admit a new customer – they are the only ones to behave in this way. First taking surreptitious glances, they then observe each other more carefully. The young woman he has noticed finally gets up and makes her way towards him. She is wearing a grey gabardine, belted at the waist, and a dark lilac-coloured felt cloche hat.

  He smiles, and inviting her to sit at his table says, ‘Peggy Bell?’

  She immediately corrects him, comprehensively sweeping aside both her nickname and her maiden name to avert all familiarity: ‘Magaret MacLane. So you must be Adam Schmalker?’

  But he too has changed his name and in turn corrects her. ‘Magnus.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ she says. ‘Else told me…’

  She does not complete the sentence. Magnus soon discovers she has a habit of suddenly falling silent in the middle of a sentence, leaving her words suspended.

  She smokes a lot, stubbing out each cigarette after a few puffs. She smokes in the same way she speaks, in fits and starts, nervously, suddenly breaking off as if changing her mind. The flighty young girl Magnus knew of old would switch without transition from laughter to slight melancholy. Now she switches from a staccato delivery of words to abrupt silence. Her lime-green eyes have acquired a cold glitter, with no gaiety or reverie to lend them any golden reflections, and she so rarely smiles that the dimple in her left cheek remains almost imperceptible. Even her freckles have faded, and her girlish hands have lost their fleshiness, and are now thin and fragile. Finally, when she removes her hat, Magnus recognizes her lovely tawny-coloured hair, but cut short. And is she examining him just as closely, he wonders, comparing his present appearance with that of the adolescent she had fun one day in seducing? But does she even remember him? Has she ever attributed the least importance to him?

  Their first encounter does not last long. It is a meeting without warmth, pretty heavy-going in fact, so tense and aggressive is Peggy in asserting her identity as Margaret MacLane. She has come only to discuss terms and arrangements for the lessons she wants to take. Any other topic of conversation is brushed aside. She asks Magnus no personal questions and is no more prepared to allow him to question her about her own past or about her present life and what her plans are. At the end of this strictly professional interview, it is decided that she will come to her teacher twice a week for two one-and-a-half hour lessons, and that she will pay him at the end of each lesson. With a decisive gesture she puts her cloche hat on again, gets to her feet, says goodbye, and quickly walks away without a backward glance.

  Sequence

  Loneliness whose big heart is clogged with ice

  How could you lend me the warmth

  You lack and we feel embarrassed

  And scared to regret?

  Go away, we couldn’t do anything for each other,

  At most exchange our ice

  And for a moment watch it melt

  Under the dark heat that burns our brow.

  Jules Supervielle, ‘Sun’, The Innocent Convict

  Fragment 19

  His student is not particularly gifted for languages, but so eager is she to learn, determined even in her impatience, that she makes fairly rapid progress. As soon as she feels well enough equipped to express herself in German, she uses only that language to communicate with her teacher. And gradually her behaviour relaxes. She becomes less defensive, no longer talks in curt snatches. Finally, she agrees to resume her old nickname, Peggy, as if this linguistic migration made her feel young again, liberated her.

  Magnus notices this gradual transformation, and at first his explanation for it is the effort Peggy has to make to construct her sentences correctly, this concentration monopolizing her attention and thereby distracting her from the pathological guardedness she otherwise imposes on herself when speaking to anybody. But he soon suspects some other reason remains hidden behind this rather simplistic analysis, a more complex, obscure reason, related to the tragedy in Peggy’s life, as if Tim’s death had cast a pall over the mother tongue they had in common, the intimate and everyday language of their relationship as a couple, of their love; as if it had blighted that language. In fact she never speaks of this tragedy, and has never mentioned her husband’s name or made the slightest reference to him. Her assiduousness in shrouding in total silence everything about her life with Timothy MacLane makes this silence weirdly penetrating and disturbing. Magnus detects in it the constant cry of inconsolable love.

  The lessons turn into increasingly natural and spontaneous conversations that sometimes extend well beyond the time they are supposed to end. They eventually abandon the ritual of the lesson in Magnus’s studio flat, and as soon as the weather is fine they go out for a walk, in town or in the parks, or meet in a museum or café, depending on what they feel like doing that day. But she never suggests meeting at her place.

  However, one morning she telephones Magnus to invite him to come to dinner that evening. When she gives him her address, which he did not know, he realizes that she lives close to where he is, although she had led him to believe she lived in another part of town.

  A pretty white two-storey house, with tubs of flowers on the door step, and the front door painted dark green. There is no name on the bell, the little nameplate has been removed, which makes Magnus feel suddenly hesitant. He pushes the bell anyway, but it produces no sound. After a few fruitless tries, he knocks on the door. His knocks resonate strangely as if fading away into empty space. Yet the door opens and Peggy, in a pale yellow dress sprinkled with tiny flowers and orange-coloured butterflies, stands in the doorway, smiling.

  The house is actually empty, and naked light-bulbs hang from the ceiling. Peggy remarks casually that she has sold her house, the removers have been that very morning, and she is leaving the next day for Vienna. Magnus alternates between amazement and anger at Peggy’s mania for not saying anything and then suddenly presenting a fait accompli reaches an infuriating level, but he betrays neither his surprise nor his annoyance. After all, he says to himself, it is better like this: that she should go, that this secretive woman with her bizarre quirks should disappear as suddenly as she had turned up again. Yes, that she should disappear from his life before he became too fond of her presence, before he allowed himself to fall into the trap of disappointed love. He observes her with forced coldness. Certainly, she looks pretty in her floaty dress the colour of a starry dawn, with a halo of red curls round her forehead, her bright green eyes and child-like smile, but he keeps these charms at a distance, as if admiring a love
ly statue behind a glass case in a museum, on his way past it.

  In the unfurnished living room she has improvised a table by placing a plank of wood on some trestles and set two garden chairs facing each other. She has covered the plank not with a paper tablecloth but a large magnificently woven damask cloth in silky shades of white and yellow. The plates are paper plates, but the glasses are crystal. She has bought some excellent wines, and offers him black olives and cashew nuts served in plastic containers while they await the delivery of a takeaway meal ordered from an Indian restaurant. He has never seen her so relaxed and gaily talkative, except in the old days at the Schmalkers’ house, and it is as though time has shifted, as if the clock has turned back, and he has before him the delightful flighty young girl from whom he stole a kiss. But this evening he has no desire to kiss her, but rather to slap her. And besides, this fraudulent young girl is absurdly chattering on in German, and this irritates him. Everything irritates him, himself first and foremost for taking part in this farce he is at a loss to understand and in which ultimately he is not in the least bit interested.

  The meal is delivered and Peggy hastens to serve the dishes while the food is still hot. Magnus eats without appetite and drinks without pleasure, though the wines are superb. He grows increasingly bad-tempered as his hostess, animated by the wine that she takes with little sips of enjoyment, becomes more and more radiant. And suddenly unable to contain his annoyance, he says in English, ‘I’m bored.’

  Then driven by a cold rage whose intensity he would be unable to explain, he goes on, still speaking in English: ‘Yes, I’m bored with you. I’m disappointed in you. I taught you my language, even though I’m averse to speaking it, but what have you taught me? Nothing. For nearly five months we’ve seen each other twice a week, sometimes more, but never have you told me anything about yourself, or been bothered about me. Just who are you bothered about? No one but yourself. We were neighbours, so why pretend you were living on the other side of town? It’s a small detail, but why always be evasive and misleading, conceal things, lie? For you lie, you like to lie, to invent secrets, to fabricate a bogus mysteriousness. It’s childish and tedious.’

  Peggy listens. She is no longer smiling. Her face has lost the flush and radiance the wine had given it. Even her lips are white.

  He sees her sitting there in front of him, very stiff, as though nailed to her chair, with a chalky complexion, her hands clenched on the tablecloth. Far from being moved by the violent distress he has produced in her, he continues his indictment.

  ‘And let me tell you, you’re not honouring the memory of your husband by refusing to mention him, never uttering his name, not even here, this evening, in this house that was also his, where you lived together, and which you’ve just sold off like some unwanted piece of old furniture.’

  He hears the quickened breathing of the young woman, paler than her dress the colour of a sad dawn that hangs loose on her paralysed body, and he hears his own voice whose inflections and quality are bizarrely unrecognizable to him, and he does not know where the harsh words he utters in this aggressive tone come from. ‘I don’t love you. I’ve never loved you, and I never will …’ With calm cruelty a voice that is not his own delivers words full of hostility, bitterness. Words that are no longer his, have nothing to do with him, appal him. But they issue from him, like the moans or confused words that issue from a sleeping man. ‘There’s nothing about you that I love, neither your voice, your body, your skin, nor your smell. Everything about you is repellant to me …’

  Then a curious transfer or, rather, displacement occurs: Peggy slowly gets to her feet and takes over the acrimonious monologue in a subdued whispering voice: ‘Everything about you is repellant and unbearable to me. I wish you’d disappear. But even that wouldn’t be enough. I wish I’d never met you. Never.’

  With these words she falls silent, standing behind her chair, her hands resting on the back of it. She stands there very erect, with a fixed stony gaze, lost in a vision that envelops her in a bluish light – the scene brought to life by the declaration of non-love their two crazed voices delivered a moment ago is suffused with the same light as on the day it actually took place, out on the cliff-tops.

  On the towering chalk cliffs overlooking the English Channel, white rock and grey waters with reflections of steel blue, purple and silvery green, up there, where the view is so extensive, where you can breath a sense of unlimited space. Some evenings, when the weather is clear, you can see France on the other side of the Channel. Up there, where the wind blows free, carrying sea, sky and forest smells, gulls nest on the crags, black-headed sheep graze level with the sky.

  Up there, a couple went walking one spring morning. It is this couple that Peggy can see, that she watches, unblinking, so intensely that Magnus too can see the scene in that steady gaze.

  And the past invites itself into the dining room, and takes its place at the table between the two who are dining together.

  Two figures walk with slow measured steps. They seem to glide through the grass rippling in the wind. Sometimes one of them stops, and the other turns to face the one who has stopped, then the couple resume their progress.

  A man and a woman, they walk side by side but do not take each other’s arm or hold hands. They brush shoulders, and yet there is a sense of insuperable distance between them. Their mere presence on the cliff-top is enough to harden the morning light, erode the peacefulness of the place, circumscribe the immensity of space and reduce it to a stage set.

  They have reached the edge of the cliff. They face each other, less than a metre apart. The sun is still weak, the sky a milky blue, the sea a pinkish grey, darkening on the horizon. The woman speaks without raising her voice, but the wind that steals everything – pollen, dust, sand and leaves, smells and sounds – snatches her words and carries them off in its invisible folds to sow them in another place, at another time.

  Standing there stiffly, with her hands stuffed into the pockets of her raincoat, the woman says, ‘I’m bored with you, bored to death. I don’t love you. I’ve never loved you and never will. There is nothing about you that I love, neither your voice, your body, your skin, nor your smell. Everything about you is repellant and unbearable to me. I wish you’d disappear. But even that wouldn’t be enough. I wish I’d never met you. Never.’

  The man says nothing. He is dazed by these words that require no answer, that nullify anything he might say. He recoils a few steps under this verbal assault.

  He is standing on the very edge of the cliff, and the void to which he has his back turned stealthily wraps itself round his heels, creeps up his legs, swirls in his knees and surges up to the back of his neck in an icy rush. He has no need to see the void, his whole body can sense it, as it would sense the presence of a wild animal crouched at his heels. He is seized with terror and cannot move. He casts an imploring glance at the woman, not for her to say some tender words at last – he is at that moment well beyond, or well short of, any hope of love. He is incapable of any sentiment, utterly overcome with vertigo, with pure, thoroughly physical panic. All he expects is a gesture, an extended hand to wrest him from the pull of the void. But the woman remains impassive, with her hands in her pockets, and the look she darts at him has the brutality of a slap in the face. Nevertheless he clings to that look, spiteful as it is, it is his only lifeline, helping him to keep his precarious balance.

  Has she understood his plea? She turns her head away, lets her gaze wander elsewhere, indifferent. Oh, look, the sea over there has turned a shade of turquoise, and there’s a seagull flying beneath the clouds, screaming its hunger, and there’s a ferry sailing by, a fast-moving little black speck, like a scuttling beetle. She smiles and her smile is carried away by the wind.

  She hears a slight sound. She turns round. There is no one there. The man has disappeared. That’s what she wanted, isn’t it? A few seconds go by, longer than a lifetime, and another sound can be heard, a distant thud, ghastly in its brevity and
flatness.

  She walks off, quickening her step so much she is almost running. She is not thinking at all, she refuses to think. She is a rolling stone, and there was another stone that fell, that dropped into the water with a horrible dull sound. Why would she be thinking, or how? She has just shed her humanity.

  Sequence

  A heath.

  KENT: Who’s there, besides foul weather?

  GENTALMAN: One minded like the weather, most unquietly.

  KENT: I know you. Where’s the king?

  GENTALMAN: Contending with the fretful elements;

  Bids the wind blow the earth into the sea,

  Or swell the curled waters ’bove the main,

  That things might change or cease…

  LEAR: My wits begin to turn.

  Come on, my boy. How dost, my boy? Art cold?

  I am cold myself…

  FOOL: He that has and a little tiny wit

  With heigh-ho, the wind and the rain –

  Must make content with his fortunes fit,