Sylvie Germain - Magnus

you who have not listened

to the heartbeat

of a man about to die.

Charlotte Delbo, ‘Useless Knowledge’

It is not just History with a capital H that repeats itself, so does family history. In both cases the repetition is spiced with nuances, with slight variations, tempering the effect of a rehash.

The illness that twenty-five years earlier had carried off her father in less than a month strikes May down at the same age and progresses just as swiftly. Within a few days it drains her of strength, confines her to bed, and constricts her breathing, reducing her to complete helplessness. Magnus never leaves her bedside, Terence though nearby keeps out of the way. But when May senses the countdown to her death is no longer to be measured in days but hours, she asks Magnus to leave the room and to call Terence.

She tells Terence to close the door, then to come and lie in the bed beside her. It is in his arms, close to his body, a body she has never stripped naked, never embraced or caressed, that she wants to die. Only the tenderness and silence of the body of a man impervious to desire for her, that of her fraternal spouse, her sibling soul, can help her to resign herself, to pass on without fear or anger through death into the unknown. Close to the body of her lover this would be beyond her, she would feel too much rebellion and pain. And she wants to be capable of accepting the inevitable, to meet it in single combat. She wants to succeed in doing honour to her death.

Terence lies by her side, gently folds her in his arms. With their faces touching, their eyes are so close their lashes brush against each other’s and their gaze is indivisible. They cannot see anything, all they perceive is a quivering glimmer like a little pool of sunshine at the heart of a bush. This amuses them. May has not enough strength to laugh any more, she smiles. And their smiles also mingle, and their breath. They do not speak, having nothing more to say to each other, or too much to say, at this moment it is all one. And they feel content, curled up together like that, out of time, free of desire, in the starkness of love. Their closeness has never been so intense, immense, and luminous. They are in a state of absolute trust, total self-surrender to the other, total forgetfulness of self in wonderment. Never have they felt so much a presence to each other, a presence in the world — but only on the outer edge, no longer in the thick of it.

Terence sees the little pool of light that quivered as the tips of his eyelashes grow dim, he hears the breath that whispered in unison with his own fall silent. Yet he does not move, he simply holds May’s face in his hands and remains there for a long time, a long time in the now infinite silence of love.

May has done honour to her death.

Magnus is waiting outside the bedroom, not expecting to be let back in. A great emptiness opens up inside him as the hours pass. His mind is blank, he feels nothing but a wave of peculiar coldness travelling through his body. He is neither patient nor impatient, he is simply there, like a tightrope walker pausing in the middle of his tightrope stretched above a desert. He has to remain very still to retain his equilibrium.

At last Terence emerges from the bedroom. He does not say a word, his face conveys nothing in particular. He slowly approaches Magnus and takes his face in his hands, just as he held May’s face. Magnus closes his eyes, he lets May tell him of her death through this physical contact, and say goodbye to him with the lightest of touches. He feels in the palms of her messenger the warmth that has left her. He recognizes in this touch the texture of May’s skin. Terence’s hands are imbued with May’s breath and smile. He then places the messenger’s hands over his ears, and he hears the sound of his lover’s heart beating the way he used to hear it beat after making love, when he would fall asleep with his head resting on her breast or on her belly.

May is cremated and her ashes scattered in the wind, according to her wishes. For this ceremony of sowing the open sky with her remains, Terence hires a hot-air balloon to carry Magnus, Scott and a few of the couple’s close friends. They all wear clothes of every shade of purple and green, May’s favourite colours. Terence opens a bottle of barackpalinka, the Hungarian apricot brandy that was her favourite drink, and pours everyone a small glassful. They all drain their glasses to her memory as her ashes escape from the urn and disperse in empty space. A fleeting silver-grey cloud floats in the air that soon regains its transparency.

So this is what it comes down to: a life, a body once so intensely active, bubbling with words, laughter and cries, animated with countless projects, insatiable desires, reduced to a handful of pale ashes that dissolve in the wind.

May has chosen the wind and empty space for a tomb, and this empty space opens up around Magnus. The present is swallowed up in the abyss of a blue-white sky of a tranquillity to make you weep. Standing there in the slowly drifting gondola, Magnus has the impression of being an ungainly bird caught in the breeze, not knowing where it comes from or more importantly where it is going. She who opened up his horizons and set him back on the path leading towards the future is gone, and suddenly he feels a great coldness, a burning — the sensations are confused. A chill blaze ignites in his heart’s core, pours into his limbs, flows through his spinal column, and silently explodes in his head, just as on that summer night in Hamburg, when the hour of Gomorrah struck, when the woman he believes was his mother suddenly let go of his hand to dance with death. He has the same taste of nothingness in his mouth, he feels the formation in his flesh of the same precipitate of amazement and loneliness. He is not widowed but orphaned by the loss of his companion, his lover. Terence is the one who is widowed.

The chill blaze licks at his brain, and his thoughts become a yawning chasm. Appalled by his own question he wonders, ‘Did May love me? And did I love her? Have I ever really loved anyone? Or was it all nothing but illusion?’ He does not know, knows nothing any more, doubts everything, doubts himself. In the end he feels not so much orphaned by the loss of May as bereft of the new identity he had forged through being with her. Yes, just as when the hour of Gomorrah struck, he is going to have to start again from zero. But a zero charged with very intense memories this time, not gutted by oblivion.

A star looks down at me,

And says: ‘Here I and you

Stand, each in our degree:

What do you mean to do, –

Mean to do?’

I say: ‘For all I know,

Wait, and let Time go by,

Till my change come.’ — ‘Just so,’

The star says: ‘So mean I: –

So mean I.’

Thomas Hardy, ‘Waiting Both’

What May has never done during her lifetime, never tried to do, quite the contrary — come between Terence and the person he was in love with — she provokes by her death. Shortly after the scattering of the ashes ceremony Scott leaves Terence. All desire for his lover has suddenly slumped, turned to impotence. Terence’s body seems untouchable, unapproachable even, as if May by dying in his arms had left something of her death on his skin and ingrained in the depths of his eyes the reflection of her face reeling into darkness, into silence. The smell of his body has changed, says Scott, the texture of his skin, and above all his gaze. He has an aura of intense, overpowering fustiness. The intolerable fustiness of death, which is so insidiously contagious.