Sylvie Germain - Magnus

And he holds his breath on the brink of this maybe, before the infant snuggled in her cradle, before the enigma of that body, so tiny and vulnerable and yet supreme, absorbed in the sound of its own blood in which there yet murmurs the entire memory of the world, the universe.

Hannelore always behaves towards him as a considerate but distant host; Lothar, as a tutor primarily concerned for the sound academic, moral and religious education of his nephew. But offering no emotional guidance whatsoever. His feelings are unruly, he does not know what he likes, or what he wants. He does not know how to love. From time to time, whenever he can, he goes with a prostitute, but his heart rings hollow.

This is what it comes down to: the Schmalkers are tutors carrying out their educational duty as best they can. For Adam is well aware he is an outsider grafted on to his uncle’s family, a refugee twice over under the roof of emigrés. He is not their son and never will be. Worse, he remains the offspring of a cowardly killer and through her stupidity and vanity a criminal by association. His powerlessness to wipe out this sickening ancestry, or at least call to account the parents he loved with an innocence he now deems culpable, translates into a violent animus towards himself. This bitterness inwardly chokes him, and as he emerges from adolescence sculpts his features with harshness.

The puny child he used to be, owing to years of poverty in Friedrichshafen, becomes at eighteen a young man of medium height with burly shoulders and a rough-hewn face. His hair has darkened to a shade of walnut with coppery glints and his once winsome curls are now shaggy and unkempt. His forehead is broad and prominent, his eyebrows are bushy circumflexes, and there is a bronze-tinged smokiness to his deep-set light brown eyes. He has high cheekbones, a flat nose, full lips, the upper one slightly projecting, and a square jaw. None of the prettiness of his mother or the imposing aspect of his father in their younger days. There is something of the bear and ram about him.

BEAR: Like all large wild animals, the bear is one of the symbols of the chthonian unconscious — lunar and therefore nocturnal, deriving from the inner landscapes of the earth mother.

Many peoples regarded the bear as their ancestor. In Siberia until a short time ago there were still graveyards for bears.

For the Yakut of Siberia the bear knows everything, remembers everything and forgets nothing . The Altaic Tartars believe the bear hears through the medium of the earth , and the Soyot say, the earth is the ear of the bear .

In Europe the mysterious huffing of the bear emanates from caves. It is therefore an expression of darkness, of gloom; in alchemy it corresponds to the blackness of the primary state of matter. Darkness and the invisible being associated with that which is taboo, the bear’s role as initiator into the arcane is thereby reinforced.

RAM: The ram is a cosmic representation of the animal force of the fire that erupts dramatically, explosively, at the earliest moment of materialization. This fire is both creative and destructive, blind and rebellious, chaotic and prolonged, prolific and sublime, and from a central point spreads out in every direction. This fiery force relates to the inceptive surge of vitality, the primordial impulse of life, with all that is pure crude urgency in such an inchoate process, all that is ebullient, zestful, indomitable energy, dynamic excess, fervid animation.

Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant

Dictionary of Symbols

Since he has a great facility for learning languages and still nurtures an obscure passion for Spanish, he chooses to study Romance languages at university, Portuguese and French as well as Spanish. In fact he is especially gifted with an extraordinary memory, having diligently trained it from the age of six as a defensive reaction to the loss of all his memories of early childhood. He can instantly memorize every new word he reads or hears. This retentiveness also applies to anything visual. But while this excessive memory might be an advantage in his studies, it is also a burden to him. His memory remains active without respite, registering the slightest detail, letting nothing go. It torments him even at night, fomenting in his dreams a riot of images and words with an exactitude that sometimes wakens him with a start, so razor-sharp is it. He then has the impression of a rift in time, of past and present colliding, running into each other, overthrowing the sequence of events. Coexisting inside him, intact, unbearably vivid and enduring, is every moment of his life since the age of six. It is therefore impossible for him to mourn his parents, to distance himself from them, from their lies, their madness, their crimes. And their ill deeds oppress him with shame, sadness, and anger, they contaminate his body, imprison his youth. They hold his heart captive. He is the posthumous hostage of two predators whose death now guarantees them eternal impunity, and therefore a perpetual injustice to him. Whether or not there is any judgement to face in the hereafter does not concern him. It is here and now, before the world, that the mortified son would like to make his parents pay, and particularly his father.

At the end of his third year of studies, he goes to Mexico for five weeks. This is the first journey he has made since emigrating to England and his first foray outside Europe. He goes off on his own to encounter, by himself, a country and a language that as yet he only knows through books and that torment him with caustic desire.

When he arrives in this country he has the sense of finally meeting someone in the flesh after years of only hearing their voice. He encounters the vast, rugged, magnificent landmass of the language in which the bogus Felipe Gomez Herrera was entombed. After ten days in Mexico, he sets out for the state of Veracruz. He does not know what exactly he hopes to find there. He has no knowledge of where his father lies, or even if he was buried or cremated. He knows no one who could tell him about the fugitive’s last hours. His mother had announced only the brutal fact: the death of Clemens Dunkeltal by his own hand, with no other explanation. Then she had immured herself in her despair, so worn down by loneliness that little by little she died of it. So he wanders first of all through the town of Veracruz, its suburbs, port and shipyards. Sometimes he stops in the middle of the pavement, examines the facades of the houses, wondering if his father lived there, perhaps hid there. Or walking on the quayside, he watches the ships, one of which might in the past have carried the absconder. He scans the dark waters glinting with greasy brilliance in the harbour where rather than face justice that bastard, on his last legs and down to his last cent, maybe threw himself in. He juggles all day long with such hypotheses but settles on none of them.

One evening, while drifting along in this way, he notices a woman walking down an avenue in front of him. Her step is confident, she has black hair plaited in a long thick braid, and terrific legs. Forgetful for a moment of his ruminations, he follows her for the sole pleasure of observing this figure that moves likes a dancer.

At one point the woman steps off the pavement to cross the road, but hardly has she set foot on the highway than a car she has not seen comes speeding towards her. Adam rushes forward and manages just in time to grab her by the arm and pull her back. The reckless driver goes hurtling by, indifferent to the accident he almost caused. The woman is thoroughly dazed by the shock and the roar of the car, Adam is breathless. Eventually she says to him in English with a strong American accent, ‘Thank you, I think you just saved my life …’ Then, recovering herself, she repeats the same phrase in Spanish, searching for her words.