Magnus (18 page)

Magnus listens with only half an ear. He is feeling tired again. His companion starts singing, his voice still tuneful. He intones the litany of the Virgin in Latin. Then he rises and calmly announces, ‘I shan’t be coming back again. Next time, you’ll come to me. I can rely on you, can’t I?’

Magnus reminds him that he does not know where he lives, if indeed he lives anywhere.

‘Not to worry, I’ll send my bees to fetch you. All you have to do is follow them.’

And as on the previous day, he trips off amid a buzzing of insects.

Magnus watches Brother Jean go, the figure of an elderly child in perpetual flight. A wood sprite who frolics with bees, who wields words illuminated like the pages of an old missal. Magnus feels as if he has been unwittingly introduced into a fairy tale. An antiquated tale inadvertently inserted into the rambling story of his life. It was charming, but he thinks he would have preferred to be invited into a completely different narrative: he has outgrown fairy tales. The secret of the Angel of the Word! He would be content to see the more modest secret of his early childhood finally explained, and even more so the secret of the vast nowhere into which the dead disappeared. The gift of God! But it is the gift of life that Magnus wants – and for the gift of life to be returned to those who have been robbed of it.

Once upon a time
… This is how all stories that have never happened begin. Myths, fables, legends.

The story told has dissolved into a distant past, like vegetable matter in marshland, or bodies in humus, giving rise to will-o’-the-wisps that flit through the darkness, skimming the ground. Likewise do the elements of myths and fables act in the obscurity of our thoughts.

Once
… an imprecise word referring to a past to which no date can be put. Or the one particular occasion on which an event took place.

Once upon a time
… So which is it? A once and for all occasion that did indeed happen or a once of eternal vagueness, for ever unresolved? Its temporal status remains ambiguous.

Once upon a time
… A ritual formula that leads into a story, like a little hidden door opening onto an inner courtyard or a secret corridor. But in what sense have they never happened, these stories unrecognized by History, which admits into its corpus only established proven events whose relation to reality is exclusively diurnal. What do we know of what happens in the night time of reality? The imaginary is reality’s nocturnal lover.

The corpus of History is a body – whose flesh is language, words spoken and written – and like all bodies it is opaque, and therefore casts a shadow.
Once upon a time
is this shadow it produces, a counterpart of more fluid, shifting words and utterances.

Once upon a time
: corpus of a deeper, more intense memory than that of History; seedbed of reality, which by morning has forgotten this pre-seeding, retaining only the visible palpable traces of it.

Presently, there are sometimes stray characters who seem for ever to roam reality’s darkness, and who migrate from one story to another, constantly in search of some word that would finally give them full access to life, even at the cost of their own death.

The time may come when characters encounter each other at the intersection of stories that have lost direction, stories yearning for new stories, ever and always.

The summer is nearly over. Brother Jean has not reappeared. He must have been having impish fun among his hives. Magnus hardly gives him any thought, but since that lunch they had together he has no longer felt the need to shut himself up in the barn. More importantly, he is thinking of leaving this place, this solitude. He is ready to move on. The monk was right, he has had his fill of emptiness and seclusion. The heavy silence deposited inside him is beginning to clear, to stir. And this sun-ripened silence, as Brother Jean might say, is impelling him to be on his way again.

He is preparing for his departure, this time in tranquil indifference, no longer in the haste of grief and shame.

They turn up one morning in a sonorous cloud. They fly swiftly through the air, undulating, at the height of a man. Magnus sees this golden brown ball rushing towards him. He takes fright, thinking he is being attacked by a swarm. But the cloud halts one metre from his face. The buzzing is agitated. Magnus recalls what Brother Jean said, that he would send his messengers when the time came. Yet he hesitates to take seriously the hermit’s whimsical promise.

The little cloud hangs there, wavering, buzzing louder and louder, then retreats slightly. Magnus takes a step forward. The bees move away an equal distance. He takes another step forward. The same thing happens. Then he starts walking, resolutely following their lead.

He is led along paths he has never taken before, shortcuts across fields and through groves. His guides move fast, he can hardly keep up. He crosses the river at a point where it is very deeply embanked, via a wooden footbridge that pitches at every step. He enters a forest, comes to a clearing. He recognizes it as the one where he once rested, to which he never found the way back again.

The bees disperse, returning to their hives. Brother Jean is sitting in the middle of the clearing, with his back resting against the mossy niche. He is wearing a voluminous black cape with a gaping hood on the back of his neck. ‘Goodday to you, son!’ he greets Magnus as on every previous occasion. ‘Come and sit next to me.’

Magnus sits down beside him. He says nothing, asks no questions. He waits for his host to start the conversation. But the monk, usually so exuberant, remains silent, and does so for a long time. The forest around them emits a murmur of multiple sounds with the underlying humming from the hives in the background: the rustling of foliage, the swishing of grass, the chirping of insects, the splashing of a stream, the cracklings of dry twigs; little piercing cries or piping calls from the birds; the whistling and sighing of the wind; and now and again the barking of dogs and echoes of human voices in the distance.

Brother Jean looks up at the foliage of a beech tree, and pointing at a few leaves that have just detached themselves and are beginning to fall to the ground, he murmurs to Magnus, ‘Listen!’ The oval-shaped leaves, already brown, come slowly fluttering down. Three of them, caught in a rising air current, hover in the tree-top, like coppery commas dancing in the well of light shafting through the mass of branches. Vagabond commas punctuating in total freedom a luminously unadorned text. But all of a sudden they come tumbling down, the air current having moved on to blow elsewhere.

‘Did you hear that?’ asks Brother Jean.

Magnus has watched this vegetal farandole closely. He can describe it visually but not aurally. The little fellow settles back into silence. Magnus realizes that as long as he is unable to distinguish the soft sigh of a falling leaf against the background of the various sounds of the forest and the
basso continuo
of the hives, his companion will say nothing. The hours slip by, the air gradually cools. The scene of red leaves falling recurs a countless number of times. So many erratic silent commas.

Magnus gives a slight start, turns his head to the left. His gaze catches the moment a translucent yellow leaf, as fine as an insect’s wing, reaches the ground a little way off from him. His hearing perceived it before his eyes, better than his eyes. ‘I’m listening,’ he says to Brother Jean. But instead of finally breaking the silence Brother Jean pulls the hood of his cowled robe over his head and huddles up, with his hands flat on his knees, his forehead bowed. Thus wrapped in his black chrysalis, he dozes off. His head nods, eventually falling on Magnus’s shoulder. His breathing falters, becomes deeper and slower.

That is all – no blazing light, no agitation in that drowsy body, no throaty rattle or muttering from his lips. Just this breathing rising slowly, amply, from the depths of a body concentrated not on itself but on self-oblivion, on an excavation, a hollowing-out of the self. And this breathing grows lighter, easier. It is as soft and penetrating as the sound of an oboe. A sigh of light escaping from the darkness. A vocal smile quietly ringing in the air. An exhalation of silence.

That is all, but so totally have these two men surrendered to listening to this breathing and so united are they in their surrender, Magnus is overwhelmed by it. This tenuous song wells up as much from his own body as his companion’s, it caresses his flesh under his skin, flows in his blood. This caress felt from inside his body stirs him, amazes him, and engulfs him in himself more powerfully than any caress exchanged in love-making. This very fleeting embrace derives from way beyond anything he has previous experienced. It is radically new, a mental and carnal abduction of thrilling delicacy. It is life itself embracing him from within, and with one impulse he encompasses it with all his senses.

Brother Jean rouses from his somnolence, lifts his head and snorts. His breathing has returned to normal. And Magnus does likewise. They are attuned. They get to their feet. Brother Jean pushes back his cowl, uncovering his head. His face bears the trace of the intentness of mind he has just exacted of himself – his face that of a very aged infant wakened by a dream mounting inside him whose amplitude he cannot contain, his brow creased by this upsurge of pure energy, his eyes clouded with a vision already receding.

‘Go home,’ he says. ‘Come back when you’re needed. It won’t be long, tomorrow, or in a few days’ time. You’ll know when to return and what you must do. You can find your way now.’

He walks with Magnus to the edge of the forest. ‘When it’s all over,’ he says, ‘go and tell my brothers at the abbey. Take them my robe, it’s theirs by right. That’s where I was given the habit. It doesn’t belong to me.’ He gazes at the landscape for a moment. ‘I’ve enjoyed my life,’ he adds, ‘and loved this countryside where I’ve always lived.’ Then he turns to his companion, gives him a quick hug, and flits away towards the clearing.

There is a spirit that man acquires over the course of time. But there is another spirit that enters man abundantly and rapidly, more rapidly than the blinking of an eye, for being itself beyond time this spirit has no need of time.

Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav

… he will see that there is no limit to his intellect, and that he must search deeply … in the place where the mouth is incapable of speaking and the ear incapable of hearing. Then, like he who sleeps and whose eyes are closed, he will see visions of God, as it is written: ‘I was asleep but my heart waked, it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh’. And when he opens his eyes, and still more when another speaks to him, he will choose death rather than life, for it will be to him as if he were dead, for he will have forgotten what he saw. Then he will study his spirit as one studies a book in which great marvels are written.

Rabbi shem Tovibn Gaon

God never does the same thing twice. And when a soul returns, another spirit becomes its companion.

Rabbi Nahman of Bratlav

Magnus returns two days later. He has been given no particular sign, he simply has the clear conviction the moment has come. When he enters the clearing he notices a long black shadow projecting from the niche, which bears no relation to the size of the niche or to the sunlight. It is a narrow trench, quite deep, with a spade set beside it, and the neatly folded robe.

An intense buzzing rises from this trench; it is seething with thousands of bees. And now suddenly they all take flight, shooting up like erupting lava. The quivering, twisting column climbs into the treetops, then fragments and scatters in an amazing shower of gleaming yellow. Every bee returns to its usual task.

At the bottom of the trench lies Brother Jean, with his rosary wrapped round his hands, which are crossed over his breast. His body is completely covered with bee-glue, and glimmering with a reddish lustre. A few bees, exhausted by their work of embalmment, are lying on the body, sprinkling it with gleams of pale gold.

Magnus seizes the spade and fills the grave. The sweet smell of the balm mingles with the dank bitter smell of the humus.

He takes Brother Jean’s robe back to the abbey. But the habit is so worn, patched up all over, it is good for nothing but rags.

He attends the old monk’s memorial service. The abbot gives a brief summary of the career of Blaise Mauperthuis, who entered the monastery as a convert at a very young age, early in the century, becoming a monk a few years later, and eventually a hermit. But a hermit resembling those bees he so loved (to the extent of choosing to lie among them in the depths of the forest); one who was always gravitating towards the monastery, bringing his pots of honey and news of the trees, birds, and wild beasts to which he became closer than to his religious brothers. Brother Jean, an outlandish monk, who was said to have displayed in equal measure eccentricity and sensibility, ingenuousness and a refusal to forgo his independence. But the abbot bows before the mystery of every vocation, and he concludes by relating with some humour a few anecdotes about this bee-loving friar who as he grew older had acquired the habit of addressing all men, even his superior, with a joyful “Goodday to you, son!’ and all women with a ‘Goodday to you, daughter!’ He remembers the day when Brother Jean turned up at the abbey in a great state of agitation to report that someone had stolen the statue of the Virgin from the clearing where he had set up his beehives. At first this theft had upset him, then having thought about it he reached the conclusion that it was all right for the robbed niche to be empty, and he decided the absence of a statue would now celebrate Our Lady of the Empty Space. Delighted with this idea, he had asked the abbot if he would come and bless the non-existent statue. Everyone in the congregation bursts out laughing at the account of this incident that took place a few months ago, and Magnus joins in the hilarity that long resonates in the church.

He closes the door of the house. That of the barn remains ajar; the lock has been broken for ages and he has never seen any point in fixing it. The wind blowing in through the open door has completely effaced the name he wrote in the dust. Not that this matters any more. The name is written on the cortex of his heart. A name as light as a bird nesting on his shoulder. A name burning in the small of his back, urging him to be off.