Free Magnus by Sylvie Germain Page A

worthy of trust. Thea had lived her life from beginning to end ruled by a mixture of paradoxes and convictions as unshakeable as they were arbitrary, without ever questioning her position.

    So Lothar was free to tell the child the truth, yet he had not done so, having never considered the time was right. And not a word of this truth – in any case an incomplete truth since no one knew the child’s real identity – had he breathed to anybody, not even his wife Hannelore or his daughters, for fear of adding to the deceit by sharing it with others without the knowledge of the person concerned. And indeed, he asks the young man how he discovered this secret. Who could possibly have told him? What happened in Mexico? But Magnus is unable to offer any explanation. How can he say, without being taken for a lunatic, ‘It was the earth that told me. The earth, the insects, the sun’? He says simply, ‘I just know, that’s all.’
    And indeed that is all he knows. The disclosure imparted to him remains incomplete, only the lie about his childhood illness and his falsified parentage has been brought out into the open and confirmed, but he is still in the dark, even more than before, about who he is and where he comes from. He retrieves from the cupboard the teddy bear he had wrapped up and put away. He unwraps it and places it on his lap. He notices the handkerchief he had tied over the diamond eyes is wet through. He unties the handkerchief and discovers the diamonds have lost all their brilliance; they are covered with a rough greyish frosting. This frosting is seeping dampness, like a patch of saltpetre that forms on the wall of a cave. He pulls off the eyes clouded with this film of grey tears, stuffs them into his pocket, and replaces them with the little buttercups that he sews back on. The teddy bear is restored to the way it used to look, with its expression of mild bewilderment. But it has no new revelation to offer the person it once protected and for so long accompanied, still providing only the name it wore tied round its neck, the cotton-thread letters now bleached of colour through exposure to the acidity of the diamond tears.

    Magnus is twenty years old (but when exactly was he born, and where?) and a quarter of his life is lost in oblivion, all the rest tainted by a long-lasting fraud.
    He is twenty years old, and he is a stranger to himself, an anonymous young man overburdened with memory, lacking however in the essential: his ancestry. A young man crazed with memory and forgetting, who juggles with his uncertainties in various languages, none of which, perhaps, is his mother tongue.
    He informs Lothar and Hannelore of his decision to leave England and to go and live in the United States. On the eve of his departure he walks along the banks of the Thames and throws the unseeing diamonds into the water. The handkerchief he has washed. It is now no more than a square of cotton thinner than a sheet of paper, translucid, of a yellowed white. He has tied it round the bear’s neck again.

Echo
    My mother … my mother’s dead … her voice … so weak … had to travel a great distance … distance … distance…
    Now I understand … And when …? when …? when …? did that happen, that she died …? she died …? she died…?

Fragment 14
    Here begins the story of Magnus. Here, somewhere between San Francisco, New York, Montreal, Los Angeles, and Vancouver, and many other cities besides. May Gleanerstones is a dedicated theatre-goer. She works as a drama critic for several magazines and newspapers, and is always ready to travel thousands of kilometres to seek out new works. Magnus often accompanies her on these trips. Terence is an art dealer and also travels frequently.
    Together with Scott, they form a family of four, bound by unconventional ties that interweave without tangling, in which love is declined in the mood of desire and friendship.
    Magnus soon adapts to this new way of life of being continually on