Magnus (7 page)

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

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 this 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.

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…

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

Stig Dagerman,
German Autumn

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.

‘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

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.