Magnus (16 page)

No, not the distortion. All Magnus knows of love is the crazed waiting, doubts and anguish, and the bliss. A great deal of bliss. And the chasm of grief, the devastation of loss, twice over. But the second time, it was he who opened up the chasm.

‘I hope it’s something you’ve never had to live through, and never will,’ she added.

He has done something worse than let love turn to revulsion – he has offered it up, live, for slaughter, by mistake, and through anger, in the name of a cold hatred suddenly turned furious, incandescent. A hatred stronger than his love.

My wits begin to turn.

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

I am cold myself.

‘What about May, what’s become of her? And Peggy? Did they stay behind in Comala?’

May, with your long black braid, Peggy, with your red-gold hair.

She and You both stand there, elsewhere, nowhere,
each in our degree
:

‘What do you mean to do?’

. . . let Time go by till my change come
.

Black milk of first light …

We dig in the air a grave …

When Magnus leaves hospital, equipped with a walking stick, it is already well into autumn. His disability is going to qualify him for a pension before long. Thus concludes the dramatic accident of which he was a victim. For so it has been classified – an accident, not a killing.

There will be no trial. Clemens Dunkeltal will be tried neither for his last murder nor for the innumerable crimes he perpetrated in the past. Seated in the armchair he is confined to as an invalid, he has just committed his last crime by getting one of his faithful friends to administer a poison that will allow him to make a cunning exit behind the mask of the charming Mr Döhrlich. That Walter! The whole affair is suppressed even before it has had time to be picked up, to become known.

What good will it do to try setting himself up again as the dispenser of justice? Magnus has lost everything by having too impetuously, presumptuously, played at being detective and avenger. He went rushing in like an enraged ram charging an obstacle harder than its own forehead. The obstacle finally gave way, reduced to smithereens, but it brought everything down with it. Magnus is now no more than the witness of his own misdeed, his own insane conduct. Witness for the prosecution, with no mercy for himself.

Magnus closes the door to the apartment for the last time. Everything is in order. Everything – in this case, nothing.

The place has been cleaned and emptied: the order of nothing prevails. Moving has turned into clearance. The furniture, household goods, and odds and ends have ended up in a sale room. Peggy’s clothes he has wrapped in the damask cloth, and this shroud weighing as much if it contained her dead body he has thrown into the Danube. A river grave for Peggy’s flowery dresses, striped dresses, polka-dot dresses, butterfly-patterned dresses, cardigans, shawls, shoes and underwear.

The Dunkeltal affair is laid to rest, buried in the respectable Döhrlich family vault where father and son lie side by side in everlasting complicity.

Meanwhile the body of love decomposes in silence, in the coldness of the earth, perishing with loneliness. Its grave is modest, very stark. Its outer layers of silk, cotton, satin, Tergal and wool, its smell, its perfumes dissolve in the opaque waters of the river.

Love’s beautiful body and its fabric outer layers stripping away desire, love’s crazed body and its sensual flesh rot in the mud, in the mire.

Once again Magnus is starting out from zero. As when the Gomorrah hour struck – an ever abysmal moment on the dial of his life. And this zero is not only burdened with very crowded memories, and fraught with loss, it is seared with remorse and helplessness.

A complete nothing reigns inside him, and this nothing creates neither order nor clarity. It leaves in his spirit only confusion and a taste of dust. Shame and remorse are not so quickly dispelled.

He leaves Vienna, his only luggage being two bags, containing clothes, a few books, some letters, his teddy bear, and Lothar’s death mask.

He does not return to London, nor does he move to Rome. He sets off with no particular destination. It is enough for him to know where he does not want to go: Vienna, London, Rome, three cities from which Peggy’s absence banishes him. ‘Magnus, an unidentified Icelander!’ Scott had suggested one evening. Magnus could at last go to the country presumed to be the land of his birth – but to seek whom? To find out what? The enigma of his birth is now less of a torment to him than that endless boundless night when his love came to grief.

He is looking for a neutral, remote place, a place of a water clock nature, where he can
let Time go by till his change come
. What change? He does not know, but for him this not knowing is now the only adventure worth while.

He goes to France, where he avoids the big cities. He flees the crowds, the noise, company of any kind. Passing through Morvan, he finds the part of the country in which to establish his solitude. He moves into a house reduced to two rooms and attached to a barn and a stable more spacious than the house itself, near a small village called Bazoches with a château rising above it. There is a broad view from this place, extending over fields and forest, and opening out in the distance over the hills of Vézelay. These names suggest nothing to him. Magnus is a stranger to this land, and to its history, and this ignorance suits him. He has come to cleanse his gaze, purge it of an excess of images. He is just a bear-man wanting to hibernate.

You hear rustlings. Laughter …
after
… Time-worn laughter, as though weary of laughing …
weary of laughing
… And voices wasted …
wasted
…

All this you hear …
you hear
…

The trees whisper evensong, the meadow grass gently sways…

You hear rustlings…

The spirit of love … heavenly light on this earthly world …
earthly world
…

The day will come when these sounds … you hear
these sounds will die
…

will die
you hear …
die

You hear the silence you hear

    nothing …
hear nothing
…

Magnus’s hibernation lasts a long time, several seasons, but generates no torpor, no passivity. It is totally taken up with doing a job no less slow than intangible: allowing time to decant, day after day, hour by hour. This is a process similar to erosion, or the formation of stalactites in a cave; a process that demands fantastic patience, concentration, scouring of the mind. A laying bare of oneself.

He walks a great deal – a step-by-step decanting. He rises early and goes out into the countryside. He has a slightly lurching gait, and always carries a wooden staff for a walking stick. The area over which he rambles describes a kind of huge star shape, with points extending in a zigzag. The local people are used to seeing his limping figure go by, along the paths, down the streets, through the villages. No one knows where he comes from, who he is exactly, or what he is doing in this remote part of the world. He is no talker, and does not give anything away. But he is no bother to anyone, polite to all. Not knowing what this foreigner’s country of origin is, people deduce from his accent and taciturn nature that he must come from northern Europe, and that is how he is referred to: ‘the guy from the North’. Or sometimes, ‘the guy with a limp’.

One day he penetrated deep into a forest on the other side of the river that winds through the Massif, and emerged into an abandoned clearing. Lined up around the edge of it were bell-shaped constructions of straw intertwined with slender branches, set on planks: old-fashioned beehives, such as Magnus had never seen before. It was cold that day, a dry frosty cold that silvered the dormant hives. In the centre of the clearing stood a small stone structure covered with moss: a niche built to house a small statue – but the statue was gone. Inside the empty niche a long brown-red slug slowly crept forward. Magnus sat on this mound to rest a while. He was soon wondering at the sounds around him. They were different from those he had grown used to hearing deep in the forest. These sounds were more nuanced, more modulated, as though someone were trying to play a wind instrument, inexpertly and yet with a certain grace. He peered into the undergrowth, strained his ears, but detected no human presence. Yet this somewhat hushed melody was coming from very close by. He rose to examine the place, and finally discovered the source of this music: some beech trees with strangely carved trunks, hollowed out in places, through which the wind whistled as it blew through them. He thought he could make out in the trunk of one of these carved trees the outline of a body, an indistinct face with a faint smile on it, and a rough-hewn pair of joined hands. In another, the figure of a man holding a trumpet. And in yet another, a relief carving of a heart; and there, the horns of a ram. But these beeches were dead, some still standing, others lying on the ground, all overgrown with ivy and brambles. He would have returned to this wood but he could never find his way back again.

He also spends long hours motionless – a drop-by-drop decanting. He has cleared out the barn but does not furnish this vast space with an earthen floor. The only function he assigns to it is to serve absolutely no purpose. An extravagant uselessness, gratuitousness, a sanctuary dedicated to emptiness.

There is a chair by the door. Holding the back of it, Magnus picks it up when he enters the barn and places it sometimes in the middle of that emptiness, sometimes against a wall, or in a corner, and there he sits, with his stick planted between his knees, and his hands folded over it. He is capable of remaining like that for hours, appreciating the silence, enjoying the effects of the gloom and the light filtering through the ill-fitting slatted walls, observing the barely perceptible swirl of dust in the rays of light, the work of a spider spinning its web in a nook. Occasionally a field mouse comes scampering by, sniffs around, turns away and scurries off. Birds too venture into his vacant sanctuary, some have built their nests here. When he leaves, he always puts the chair back by the door.

In the church at Bazoches is the tomb of a certain Vauban. Magnus finds out who this man was, learns about the extent of his achievements, the multiplicity of his interests, his genius, his courage – a remarkable man, who fell into disgrace on account of his exceptional intelligence, boldness, generosity of mind, having been thoroughly exploited by his king, whose only greatness and connection with the sun lay in the epithets he usurped.

The body buried here has had its heart cut out – Napoleon had it entombed in Les Invalides a century later. Magnus thinks back to the crypt of the church of the Augustinian Friars, which he visited with Peggy at the beginning of his stay in Vienna, to those Hapsburg hearts also wrested from the breasts in which they had formed, in which they had beaten. Hearts in exile, sealed in urns. This carving-up of the corpses of noblemen, heroes, and saints, and distributing of their limbs, bones, hair, viscera in various places seems to him a curious mixture of barbarism, obscenity, and infantile magic. What use would he have for the hearts of May, Peggy, and Lothar preserved in reliquaries?

But this splitting-up of sacred remains into separate pieces corresponds perhaps to that other phenomenon of disintegration that takes place in the living bodies of the bereft: every loved one in passing away steals a little flesh, a little blood from those who remain on earth, shivering with cold and pointlessness in the continuous drizzle of absence. Magnus’s body was diminished in this way at a very young age, when his mother, the unknown woman in Hamburg, was consumed by fire before his eyes, charring a section of his heart and transfixing his memory. And May too stole her share of his flesh, her share of his heart, mingling them with her ashes scattered in the silent blueness of the sky. Then Peggy – the great sensual abduction, and the burial of desire, of all joy, all pleasure in the black chill dampness of the earth.

Of his father he has nothing, not even an image – except maybe that first name found round the little bear’s neck, which he adopted as his own? This fragile ‘maybe’ is the only link between them. His austere guardian Lothar, who became his protective friend, has left him with a plaster mask. A lifeless mask with closed eyelids, sealed lips, robbed of that smile of wonderful goodness that quietly illuminated the world. Lothar took with him that brightness he was capable of raising at the boundaries of thought. Magnus can no longer perceive the slightest glimmer on the horizon, whether of days past or days to come.

The decanting of time is still producing only billowing mist in the distance, and a few gaps in it that have the harsh brilliance of frost.

Such is the life Magnus leads in his Morvan solitude, forming posthumous friendships at the graveside; silent friendships with this or that tree, with an ox or a ewe encountered at the edge of a field; fleeting friendships with clouds, babbling springs, smells of earth and wind. Friendships of the here and now.

My thought

and not a caress

And yet

I touched you

with my thought

my thought

and not a caress

like your memory

or words not spoken

or your closed eyes

and yet your memory

those words and looks

are the caress of a bygone day

on my thoughts.

Matthias Johannessen, ‘To touching’

Returning from one of his walks one August afternoon, Magnus notices an old woman sitting by the barn door. She is wearing a shapeless straw hat, a shift so faded it is of an indeterminate colour, and muddy overshoes. She is quietly sunning herself, with her arms folded on her chest. When she sees him approaching, she waves as if she were sitting in front of her own house and greeting a neighbour.

‘Goodday to you, son!’ she calls out in a reedy voice. Magnus thinks she must surely be some mentally confused old lady who has lost her way and sat down here thinking she is at her own house. Her face is very wrinkled, covered with wisps of hair, and her undoubtedly toothless mouth is all awry.