Sylvie Germain - Magnus

Her letter ends with this invitation, both warm and vague. Magnus soon makes it definite: he decides to go to Vienna the following month.

‘A grey ox in China

lying in the stable

stretches its backbone

and at the same moment

an ox in Uruguay

looks round to see

if someone has stirred.

Flying over both of them

through day and night

is the bird that silently

circles the planet

and never touches it

and never comes to rest.’

Jules Supervielle, ‘A grey ox in China…’

The Innocent Convict

The first time they faced each other naked, Magnus felt the ground shift under his feet. All his dreams from the past suddenly gathered in a solid mass shattering the reality that had finally come into being. Peggy’s body was already so familiar to him this sudden revelation seemed like an absurdity, an assault. And his desire for her was panicked to the point of collapsing into impotence. His own body failed him.

Lying beside her on the bed, he hardly dared look at her, caress her. His vision was blurred, with images of Peggy’s nudity contemplated in his dreams overlaying the very real vision that presented itself to him; images that rippled over her skin, making it untouchable. Peggy took his hand and laid it on her breast, gently holding it there. She did not say anything. She smiled at him, waiting for the emotion that paralysed him and made him tremble to subside. But his emotion intensified. Magnus felt his hand grow heavier, practically weld itself to Peggy’s breast. And his sense of touch became confused with his hearing. His palm could hear her heartbeats and these pulsations spread through his whole body, all listening and resonance. He shivered as though in the grip of a high fever.

This heart beating beneath his palm, ringing in his blood, was not just that of Peggy now, it was a palimpsest of sound — in which May’s heart released indistinct echoes, calling to him, reminding him.

He had made love with other women since May’s death, but none had caused such a jolt to his memory. Women briefly desired, very fleetingly and casually loved; occasional mistresses, purveyors of pleasure and oblivion, no threat to his enduring love, the woman who had enchanted his life for ten years. May’s place as friend, lover and accomplice was left unoccupied. A place set very high, beyond reach: high up in the sky’s sheer blue of empty space, amid the dreadful quiet and ashes.

And now this vacant place was suddenly destabilized, and to the question that had tormented him for years — Did May love me? And did I love her? Have I ever loved anyone? — Magnus was given an answer: a calm and profound yes. He wept silently for a long while. And as they flowed his tears dampened the sheet, Peggy’s hair, they also dampened the noise that filled his palm and pulsed in his flesh, making it sound softer. Peggy brought her face right up close to his and kissed his eyes, then licked at his tears, like a kitten. And licking at him, she laughed, then hummed a song.

Then the palimpsest heart disclosed other resonances, yet fainter than the earlier ones. They unfurled in tiny waves, barely perceptible, as if originating from a long way off, from an earlier age. From even before his birth perhaps, from the time when his body was slowly forming in the liquid darkness of his mother’s body.

And he fell asleep with his hand resting on Peggy’s breast. When he woke, all echoes within him had fallen silent, no thought constrained his movements, his desire was free. And his body this time did not fail his desire.

This scene took place several years ago now, but it continues to glow in Magnus’s memory like some permanently illuminated night-light. He knows when and where the scene took place — one evening in June 1974 at Peggy’s apartment in Vienna. But as this event was the blossoming of an old desire, long felt then forgotten, gradually revived and again thwarted and deceived, to him it feels timeless, both very distant and very close, always vivid.

They have never discussed the tragedy that occurred on the cliffs of Dover, and Magnus says very little about his own past. They each bear their respective burden of time with discretion. Nothing is denied or cancelled out, but they know it is pointless to try and explain everything, that you cannot share with another person, however close, what you experienced without them, outside of them, whether it be love or hate. What they share is the present, and their respective pasts settle in silence in the radiant shadow of this present.

The day they visited the crypt in the Church of the Augustinian Friars the inevitable reticence that surrounds consummated passions, because of the impossibility of accurately conveying them in all their subtlety, intensity and contradictions, suddenly became pathetically apparent to them as they looked on those urns containing the hearts of the Hapsburgs. In a small alcove steeped in a wan light and protected by a grille, some fifty urns of wrought silver of various sizes are lined up in two semi-circles, one above the other. Once living hearts that beat with pride in the breasts of empresses and the bodies of all-powerful emperors. That beat with passion, with fear and anger too, with jealousy, desire and sorrow, shame and hope. Of these aristocratic hearts that each in turn, in gold and steel, in splendour and in blood, rang the hours of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire, there now remains a cohort of old shrivelled muscles in formaldehyde, keeping vigil round a void. Thus do the living hide away in a corner of their memories reliquaries of affections, hard feelings, joys and sorrows that are more or less played out.

During the first two years of his relationship with Peggy, Magnus returned to London frequently to spend time with Lothar, who became ever more diminished by illness.

Progressively losing his eyesight, his voice, and to almost the same extent the ability to walk, Lothar remained seated all day long in his armchair by the window of his study. But far from enduring these infirmities as so many detestable privations, he turned them into an abrasive source of strength. From his paralysis he drew a profound sense of patience, a limitless and measureless readiness to wait in expectation of nothing, if not the unsuspected. And his immobility appeared serene, totally occupied with lengthy meditation.

In his loss of the power of speech he tasted the bitterness of that inner silence where language unravels, with every word acquiring a new weight, a greater resonance. And his silence was vibrant. In the loss of his eyesight he discovered another way of seeing: seeing behind the visible. A brightness spread over his practically inert hands and his blind man’s face. His smile especially grew luminous. As soon as anyone came into his study he would turn his face towards the visitor whom he would recognize — from their way of opening the door, their footstep — before they had even uttered a word, and he would greet them with a smile. Many things were conveyed by this smile, everything he could no longer express in words. And this ‘everything’ concentrated in the extreme, distilled to nothing, laid bare the depths of his being: the intelligence and modesty of a goodness without regard for itself.

Consigned to dwell in the silent darkness of his body, he actually conducted a multiple dialogue: with the living and the dead, with himself, and even more so with that element of the unknown whose discreet and yet sovereign presence he sensed within him.

One evening that element of the unknown summoned him wholly to the other side, beyond the visible world. Magnus was not there; he did not arrive until the day of the burial.