Magnus

by Sylvie Germain

  The Gleanerstones are older than he is. Mary, who calls herself May, is about thirty, and her husband close to forty. His dark chestnut hair has gone completely white at the temples, and the whiteness of these two little wavy wisps soften his irregular-featured face. In the course of the evening Adam detects in Terence a discerning eye and delicacy of attention, ever alert behind his easy-going manner and sense of humour, and in May a mixture of toughness and passion, impatience and determination, pride and irony. With dark eyes, a very straight nose, strong widely-spaced cheekbones, her face is flawless, like a mask of ochre-coloured wood. She owes her complexion and her features to an Indian ancestress of the Omaha tribe who, she says, has declared herself after three generations, eclipsing with quiet insolence May’s other bloodlines, Hungarian, Scottish and Ukrainian.

  Adam does more listening than talking, impressed by this couple so much more mature than he is, and above all who move in a world so different from his own: an active and open world where everything seems easy: money, travel, relationships, the art of conversation. He can tell they have a very close relationship, more like that of siblings than lovers, making their presence as straightforward as it is generous, and he enjoys their company. For the first time in his life he feels secure. However, he says nothing about the true reason for his having come to Veracruz, nothing of his German childhood. He has presented himself as an English student on holiday and he evades any questions about his family.

  At the end of their meal May searches in her handbag and pulls out a book wrapped in a paper bag. ‘This is a novel by a Mexican writer that came out two or three years ago – someone spoke to me very enthusiastically about it,’ she explains. ‘I bought it today but my level of Spanish is much weaker than yours, so I’d like to give the book to you. When you’ve read it you can tell me whether it really is worth making the effort to tackle it in the original, as was suggested to me.’

  To reinforce this reason for getting in touch again, Terence slipped his card into the bag, having written on the back of it the details of their hotel.

  Back in his hotel room, Adam opens the book. It is a copy of Pedro Pàramo by Juan Rulfo. As it is already very late and he is feeling tired, he is content to leaf through the book and pick out odd sentences at random. But Juan Rulfo’s novel does not lend itself to idle skimming, it awakens Adam’s drowsy attention and keeps it riveted. He reads straight through to the end the story of Juan Preciado and his search for the father he has never known, a certain Pedro Pàramo, who ruled the village of Comala as a petty dictator, consumed with ambition and the taste for power. But Comala now is a forsaken village beyond the compass of time and life, baked white beneath a deadly sun – ‘You’re on the earth’s burning coals there, in the very mouth of hell.’ For all is dead in Comala, and Rulfo’s tale is a strange polyphonic dirge, an interweaving of the stray plangent voices of ghosts.

  Adam keeps reading and rereading the book to the point of exhaustion. Until he is not just reading any more but entering into the book, walking through the pages, through the streets of the deserted village. He walks in the footsteps of Juan Preciado, the son in search of his father, now dissipated in the burning dust of Comala on whose walls, the colour of bone, glance the voices of the deceased, continuing to speak in their absence, to dwell on memories of those wretched lives they have long been departing.

  He walks in the footsteps of Juan Preciado, but following hard on the heels of the latter is a cohort of ghosts reduced to echoes, and these ghost voices resonate inside his own head.

  Juan Preciado is his double, his guide through the ruins of memory, the labyrinth of forgetfulness. And Pedro Pàramo, the odious provincial caudillo, a brutal and arrogant man, is Clemens Dunkeltal’s projected shadow in Comala, a village to be found everywhere and nowhere, a haunting place of no precise location. A charnel-house village exuding echoes, cries and groans, a mirage village at the crossroads of the living and the dead, the real and the imagined.

  Sequence

  You’ll feel even hotter when we get to Comala. You’re on the earth’s burning coals there, in the very mouth of hell. They say a lot of those who die there and go to hell come back to fetch their blanket…

  This town is filled with echoes. They sound as if they’re trapped inside the cavity in the walls or under the paving-stones. When you walk you sense them following in your footsteps. You hear rustlings. Laughter. Time-worn laughter, as though weary of laughing. And voices wasted through use. All this you hear. I think the day will come when these sounds die out.

  Juan Rulfo, Pedro Pàramo

  Fragment 11

  It is barely light when Adam starts out. He leaves town with the book deep in his pocket. He sets off for Comala.

  He strikes out westwards, at random, leaving the coast behind him. He passes cotton fields. He sees the sky turn rosy where it meets the orchards. He walks with his back to the sun. His shadow is still pale, unclear.

  He strides across unknown territory, chasing a ghost. But whose? That of Pedro Pàramo, Felipe Gomez Herrara, Clemens Dunkeltal, Thea, or himself? He does not know any more. In any case, the ghost flees.

  He is bound for Comala, for nowhere, for a meeting with himself. His progress is erratic, frantic. He is an angry pilgrim come to throttle the paternal ghost and that of the naive child he once was who loved his father. But the ghost keeps giving him the slip, defying him, wearing him out, and in the process his anger intensifies, distills. His shadow lengthens, darkens.

  He knows his quest is absurd, doomed to failure, but he does not relent. He senses something developing. Something indefinable. Weird and yet powerful. Between him and this place. Between him and this moment on the fringes of time. And what is conspiring inside him unsettles his memory, looses its moorings, and gradually sends it into a spin. The spinning gets faster.

  Thousands of images run backwards before his eyes, just as a dying man sees his entire past go flashing by.

  The heat is intense. He has been walking for hours. His shadow has narrowed, condensed: a black puddle at the tip of his shoes. He has not slept and has eaten nothing since the day before. All of sudden he is drained of strength. He sits at the edge of a field on a bare slope. The sun beats down, as torrid as it is high in the sky. He stretches out on the ground, overcome with dizziness.

  There he lies on the earth’s surface, in direct contact with the landmass of his father’s language-shroud, the language acid-bath that will dissolve forever the sickening remains of his love for that father. But no, Spanish is not the language of this land. It is not indigenous. It came from outside just a few centuries ago, imposed by force of arms. A more ancient language frets beneath the stones, the dust. The language of the vanquished, unyielding, intractable.

  And slowly yet another sound becomes audible. It emanates from all around, from the earth and the air, from the stones and the grass. It is a harsh haunting song that soon swells, expands, vibrates.

  The song assails the phantom-chaser’s spent body. It is the chorus of insects in the pulsing heat of noon. A multiple voice. Monotonous. Voracious. The broiling air squeals and sizzles. The ground emits faint stridulations, low hummings. The insects embroider the silence of the sun-sated earth with their stubborn little voices. On the surface of emptiness they attend to their tiny destiny. They score this incandescent time of day with vocal striations as though to leave a trace of their presence no one cares about, to prove to themselves they exist, and to enjoy as much as possible their short spell in this world. Song of euphoria, desolation and combativeness. Song of the living. Of beast and mankind.

  And all of a sudden, what was conspiring in his fevered brain just now as he staggered beneath the sun explodes in his body stretched out on the ground, riddled with the cries of insects: a tidal wave of vibrant visions sweeps through him. But his father does not figure in any of them. The rush of jolted memories that overwhelm him rise from elsewhere, from further back; it is an upsurge originating in the middle of the night that
he died – he, Adam Schmalker, before he took that name, and even before he was called Franz-Georg Dunkeltal.

  Long, long before.

  Before. In the quick of the present moment.

  He hears the bellowing of a monumental organ, deafening clashes of cymbals, the roll of millions of drums. An insane orchestra plays in the sky. It plays with instruments of steel, of fire. The tumult even reaches underground, and the ground quakes and screams.

  It is a discordant choir of men and women of all ages, children, infants, dogs, screaming in response to the orchestra’s din, and this choir that was huddled close together underground suddenly disperses in a frantic rush. Its clamour spills out into the open, scatters across the face of the earth, fragments. He is one of the fragments of that pulverized clamour. He runs, shrieking and crying.

  He sees the sky combust, burst like a dyke and torrents of black lava, blazing meteorites, sulphur-white flashes of lightning pour through the cracks. The insane orchestra is playing with fire, in a total frenzy.

  He sees human beings and animals turn into live torches, others melt into the liquefied asphalt slushing in the gutted streets, and yet others blown apart.

  He sees trees rise up in the air at an angle, enormous flame-trailing javelins that plunge into the fronts of houses while windowpanes shatter, chimneys, tiles and beams go flying.

  He sees water blaze in the harbour, in the canals, rivers, ponds, gutters. Everywhere water catches fire and evaporates with a hiss. It ignites even in the tears on the faces of the distraught, of the dying.

  He smells the acrid stench of burnt flesh, the nauseating sweetness of boiled flesh, the stink of blood and guts. Stones, pavings, timber frames are reduced to no more than black sand, gravel, bits of charcoal.

  He sees coils of garish yellow, spills of bright red, splashes of blinding orange falling from the sky, lacerating the darkness. An orgy of colours at once viscous and limpid. Gigantic gobs of scarlet and gold to crown the perished city.

  He hears the gobs of colour rumble and suddenly among the disjointed puppets running in all directions he sees a woman engulfed from head to toe in saffron flames dance a frenetic solitary waltz, emitting piercing screams. He sees her collapse, writhe for a few seconds more and…

  And then nothing.

  That’s all. He sees and hears nothing more, just that torch-woman reduced to a shapeless heap of reddening black that smokes and stinks. His mother? A fairy? A witch? A tree-trunk? A lightning-struck angel? A stranger?

  He watches her. Watches her burn to a cinder. With eyes wide open, he watches her disappear from sight, disappear from his life. With eyes wide open, eyes blinded, he watches and watches…

  Note

  The mouth of hell is the orifice by which mankind is swallowed up – and here we recognize the famous theme of the descent into Hades. It is also the place from which voices emerge … The echo is a form of sound inscribed in time and produced in certain contexts favourable to the reflection of an original sound…

  The future of an echo is a wall, an obstacle, a sentence of death. The echo impacts with something that sends it back into the past. An echo is a moving sound but one that travels backwards, with no hope of ever becoming other or different; its destiny is extinction.

  Fabienne Bradu, Echoes of Pàramo

  Fragment 1

  Hamburg. The hour of Gomorrah.

  The operation of destruction strove to prove itself worthy of this title of devastation. In the warmth of a summer’s night it staged a monstrous opera in so rapid a sequence of acts they were indistinguishable one from the other.

  ‘Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven; and he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.’

  Among the inhabitants is a little boy of five and a half. He is asleep, curled up round his teddy bear, in a cellar crowded with people. But the cellars are derisory shelters, rat traps when everything caves in on top of them, and the survivors rush to escape from the hideout strewn with shattered bodies. They flee into streets lined now with nothing but stumps of smoking walls. Distraught and shrieking, they go running to add to the uproar of Gomorrah, where screams keep rising from here and there, suddenly falling silent to resume elsewhere – other screams yet always alike.

  The little boy, wrenched from sleep, runs without comprehending anything, and mingles his crying with the great ambient din. His crying turns to sobs when the hand that was holding his suddenly lets go. He is alone in the crowd, all alone in his nightmare. For he is still asleep, asleep on his feet, running and crying. But his crying suddenly ceases when he sees the woman who was holding his hand start to waltz in the mud and ruins with a great bird of fire fastened on her back. The predator spreads its radiant wings and envelops the woman in them from head to foot. Before this abduction of amazing speed, of fierce beauty, the little boy swallows his saliva like a stone, in the same gulp losing all the words, all the names he ever knew.

  Hamburg, the moment of obliteration.

  ‘And Abraham … looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain, and beheld, and, lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace.’

  The child is not Abraham, just a little boy clutching his teddy bear very tightly to his chest, and his gaze splinters. Death takes him alive there, before the furnace, leaving him dead to his memory, to the language he spoke, to his name. His soul is petrified, his heart condenses into a block of salt. In counterpoint to the celestial conflagrations and outcry of the shattered city, he hears the thud of his salty heart beating inside the fabric body of the bear whose muzzle is crushed against his throat, whose buttercup eyes are pressed to his neck. The heat all around is suffocating, the air thick with sooty dust and gas. Only the teddy bear’s eyes seem to have preserved a miraculous clarity and gentleness.

  Hamburg, zero hour.

  ‘But [Lot’s] wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.’

  In this temporal gap a little boy who has only just died is brutally delivered back into the world, cast completely naked into one of the world’s craters. He knows nothing about himself any more. He cannot distinguish between his own body and that of the teddy bear with rununculus eyes. He now knows nothing about humanity, he confuses the human voice with the tumultuous din – of explosions, of avalanches of stones, beams and metal, of the forest of flames sweeping across the demolished town, of the wails of the dying and the screams of deranged survivors. He knows nothing any more of his language. Words are but sounds chaotically crowded into the furnace-press of war, producing a slimy run-off stinking of blood and carbonized flesh, of sulphur, gas and smoke. A greasy black run-off streaked with glittering gashes of yellow and scarlet.

  Hamburg, daybreak following Gomorrah.

  Brought into the world by war, all alone among the ruins, the newly reborn child confuses beauty with horror, madness with life, melodramatic horror with death. He sets off, like a bundle blown before the wind, carried by the tide as droves of survivors flee the fine city steeped in waters of chastisement for crimes committed by the Reich.

  When people finally show some concern for this evidently lost or orphaned child walking along in a trance, he cannot answer any question put to him. He is thought to be deaf or simple-minded. Someone has the idea of untying the scorched handkerchief round his teddy bear’s neck. There is a name embroidered on it in multi-coloured threads: Magnus. Is this the name of the teddy bear, the child’s father, or the child himself? For want of a better alternative, the young deaf-mute is given this name. And under this borrowed name he is placed in a centre with other unclaimed children waiting for adoption or foster families.

  After Gomorrah, on the verge of the moor, on the steps of hell.

  A woman turns up at the centre. She inspects all the children. A woman still young, elegant, but her face hardened by a recent bereavement. The story of th
is little boy, not a deafmute but with no memory whatsoever, interests her. She observes him for a long time, finds him cute, placid, and suspects he is intelligent. He is a curly-haired little boy, with hazel eyes, a skull that perfectly conforms to Aryan standards, and uncircumcised. Sound in body and sound in race. As for his mind, it has been denuded, a rubbed-out page ready to be rewritten. The woman will undertake to make it totally blank before writing on it to suit herself. She has a substitute text for it. A text of revenge against death.

  Notes

  At the height of summer 1943, during an extended heatwave, the RAF, supported by the US Eighth Air Force, flew a series of raids on Hamburg. The aim of this offensive code-named Operation Gomorrah was the maximum possible destruction and incineration of the city. In the course of the night raid that began at one o’clock in the morning of the 28th July 10,000 tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs were dropped on the densely populated residential area east of the Elbe…

  W.G. Sebald, Luftkrieg und Literatur

  For anyone who likes records, who wants to become an expert in ruins, and wants to see not a town in ruins but a landscape in ruins, more of a wilderness than a desert, more desolate than a mountain, and as phantasmagorical as a nightmare, there is perhaps after all only one German city that answers: Hamburg…