Magnus (6 page)

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.

The beautiful passer-by is Mary Gleanerstones. She comes from San Francisco and is spending a few days in Veracruz, accompanying her husband on a business trip. She absolutely insists on introducing Adam to Terence, her husband, whom she was on her way to join at their hotel, and she invites him to have dinner with them.

The Gleanerstones are older than he is. Mary, who calls herself May, is about thirty, and her husband close to forty. His dark chestnut hair has gone completely white at the temples, and the whiteness of these two little wavy wisps soften his irregular-featured face. In the course of the evening Adam detects in Terence a discerning eye and delicacy of attention, ever alert behind his easy-going manner and sense of humour, and in May a mixture of toughness and passion, impatience and determination, pride and irony. With dark eyes, a very straight nose, strong widely-spaced cheekbones, her face is flawless, like a mask of ochre-coloured wood. She owes her complexion and her features to an Indian ancestress of the Omaha tribe who, she says, has declared herself after three generations, eclipsing with quiet insolence May’s other bloodlines, Hungarian, Scottish and Ukrainian.

Adam does more listening than talking, impressed by this couple so much more mature than he is, and above all who move in a world so different from his own: an active and open world where everything seems easy: money, travel, relationships, the art of conversation. He can tell they have a very close relationship, more like that of siblings than lovers, making their presence as straightforward as it is generous, and he enjoys their company. For the first time in his life he feels secure. However, he says nothing about the true reason for his having come to Veracruz, nothing of his German childhood. He has presented himself as an English student on holiday and he evades any questions about his family.

At the end of their meal May searches in her handbag and pulls out a book wrapped in a paper bag. ‘This is a novel by a Mexican writer that came out two or three years ago – someone spoke to me very enthusiastically about it,’ she explains. ‘I bought it today but my level of Spanish is much weaker than yours, so I’d like to give the book to you. When you’ve read it you can tell me whether it really is worth making the effort to tackle it in the original, as was suggested to me.’

To reinforce this reason for getting in touch again, Terence slipped his card into the bag, having written on the back of it the details of their hotel.

Back in his hotel room, Adam opens the book. It is a copy of
Pedro Pàramo
by Juan Rulfo. As it is already very late and he is feeling tired, he is content to leaf through the book and pick out odd sentences at random. But Juan Rulfo’s novel does not lend itself to idle skimming, it awakens Adam’s drowsy attention and keeps it riveted. He reads straight through to the end the story of Juan Preciado and his search for the father he has never known, a certain Pedro Pàramo, who ruled the village of Comala as a petty dictator, consumed with ambition and the taste for power. But Comala now is a forsaken village beyond the compass of time and life, baked white beneath a deadly sun – ‘
You’re on the earth’s burning coals there, in the very mouth of hell
.’ For all is dead in Comala, and Rulfo’s tale is a strange polyphonic dirge, an interweaving of the stray plangent voices of ghosts.

Adam keeps reading and rereading the book to the point of exhaustion. Until he is not just reading any more but entering into the book, walking through the pages, through the streets of the deserted village. He walks in the footsteps of Juan Preciado, the son in search of his father, now dissipated in the burning dust of Comala on whose walls, the colour of bone, glance the voices of the deceased, continuing to speak in their absence, to dwell on memories of those wretched lives they have long been departing.

He walks in the footsteps of Juan Preciado, but following hard on the heels of the latter is a cohort of ghosts reduced to echoes, and these ghost voices resonate inside his own head.

Juan Preciado is his double, his guide through the ruins of memory, the labyrinth of forgetfulness. And Pedro Pàramo, the odious provincial caudillo, a brutal and arrogant man, is Clemens Dunkeltal’s projected shadow in Comala, a village to be found everywhere and nowhere, a haunting place of no precise location. A charnel-house village exuding echoes, cries and groans, a mirage village at the crossroads of the living and the dead, the real and the imagined.

You’ll feel even hotter when we get to Comala. You’re on the earth’s burning coals there, in the very mouth of hell. They say a lot of those who die there and go to hell come back to fetch their blanket…

This town is filled with echoes. They sound as if they’re trapped inside the cavity in the walls or under the paving-stones. When you walk you sense them following in your footsteps. You hear rustlings. Laughter. Time-worn laughter, as though weary of laughing. And voices wasted through use. All this you hear. I think the day will come when these sounds die out.

Juan Rulfo,
Pedro Pàramo

It is barely light when Adam starts out. He leaves town with the book deep in his pocket. He sets off for Comala.

He strikes out westwards, at random, leaving the coast behind him. He passes cotton fields. He sees the sky turn rosy where it meets the orchards. He walks with his back to the sun. His shadow is still pale, unclear.

He strides across unknown territory, chasing a ghost. But whose? That of Pedro Pàramo, Felipe Gomez Herrara, Clemens Dunkeltal, Thea, or himself? He does not know any more. In any case, the ghost flees.

He is bound for Comala, for nowhere, for a meeting with himself. His progress is erratic, frantic. He is an angry pilgrim come to throttle the paternal ghost and that of the naive child he once was who loved his father. But the ghost keeps giving him the slip, defying him, wearing him out, and in the process his anger intensifies, distills. His shadow lengthens, darkens.

He knows his quest is absurd, doomed to failure, but he does not relent. He senses something developing. Something indefinable. Weird and yet powerful. Between him and this place. Between him and this moment on the fringes of time. And what is conspiring inside him unsettles his memory, looses its moorings, and gradually sends it into a spin. The spinning gets faster.

Thousands of images run backwards before his eyes, just as a dying man sees his entire past go flashing by.

The heat is intense. He has been walking for hours. His shadow has narrowed, condensed: a black puddle at the tip of his shoes. He has not slept and has eaten nothing since the day before. All of sudden he is drained of strength. He sits at the edge of a field on a bare slope. The sun beats down, as torrid as it is high in the sky. He stretches out on the ground, overcome with dizziness.

There he lies on the earth’s surface, in direct contact with the landmass of his father’s language-shroud, the language acid-bath that will dissolve forever the sickening remains of his love for that father. But no, Spanish is not the language of this land. It is not indigenous. It came from outside just a few centuries ago, imposed by force of arms. A more ancient language frets beneath the stones, the dust. The language of the vanquished, unyielding, intractable.

And slowly yet another sound becomes audible. It emanates from all around, from the earth and the air, from the stones and the grass. It is a harsh haunting song that soon swells, expands, vibrates.

The song assails the phantom-chaser’s spent body. It is the chorus of insects in the pulsing heat of noon. A multiple voice. Monotonous. Voracious. The broiling air squeals and sizzles. The ground emits faint stridulations, low hummings. The insects embroider the silence of the sun-sated earth with their stubborn little voices. On the surface of emptiness they attend to their tiny destiny. They score this incandescent time of day with vocal striations as though to leave a trace of their presence no one cares about, to prove to themselves they exist, and to enjoy as much as possible their short spell in this world. Song of euphoria, desolation and combativeness. Song of the living. Of beast and mankind.

And all of a sudden, what was conspiring in his fevered brain just now as he staggered beneath the sun explodes in his body stretched out on the ground, riddled with the cries of insects: a tidal wave of vibrant visions sweeps through him. But his father does not figure in any of them. The rush of jolted memories that overwhelm him rise from elsewhere, from further back; it is an upsurge originating in the middle of the night that he died – he, Adam Schmalker, before he took that name, and even before he was called Franz-Georg Dunkeltal.

Long, long before.

Before. In the quick of the present moment.

He hears the bellowing of a monumental organ, deafening clashes of cymbals, the roll of millions of drums. An insane orchestra plays in the sky. It plays with instruments of steel, of fire. The tumult even reaches underground, and the ground quakes and screams.

It is a discordant choir of men and women of all ages, children, infants, dogs, screaming in response to the orchestra’s din, and this choir that was huddled close together underground suddenly disperses in a frantic rush. Its clamour spills out into the open, scatters across the face of the earth, fragments. He is one of the fragments of that pulverized clamour. He runs, shrieking and crying.

He sees the sky combust, burst like a dyke and torrents of black lava, blazing meteorites, sulphur-white flashes of lightning pour through the cracks. The insane orchestra is playing with fire, in a total frenzy.

He sees human beings and animals turn into live torches, others melt into the liquefied asphalt slushing in the gutted streets, and yet others blown apart.

He sees trees rise up in the air at an angle, enormous flame-trailing javelins that plunge into the fronts of houses while windowpanes shatter, chimneys, tiles and beams go flying.

He sees water blaze in the harbour, in the canals, rivers, ponds, gutters. Everywhere water catches fire and evaporates with a hiss. It ignites even in the tears on the faces of the distraught, of the dying.

He smells the acrid stench of burnt flesh, the nauseating sweetness of boiled flesh, the stink of blood and guts. Stones, pavings, timber frames are reduced to no more than black sand, gravel, bits of charcoal.

He sees coils of garish yellow, spills of bright red, splashes of blinding orange falling from the sky, lacerating the darkness. An orgy of colours at once viscous and limpid. Gigantic gobs of scarlet and gold to crown the perished city.

He hears the gobs of colour rumble and suddenly among the disjointed puppets running in all directions he sees a woman engulfed from head to toe in saffron flames dance a frenetic solitary waltz, emitting piercing screams. He sees her collapse, writhe for a few seconds more and…

And then nothing.

That’s all. He sees and hears nothing more, just that torch-woman reduced to a shapeless heap of reddening black that smokes and stinks. His mother? A fairy? A witch? A tree-trunk? A lightning-struck angel? A stranger?

He watches her. Watches her burn to a cinder. With eyes wide open, he watches her disappear from sight, disappear from his life. With eyes wide open, eyes blinded, he watches and watches…

The mouth of hell is the orifice by which mankind is swallowed up – and here we recognize the famous theme of the descent into Hades. It is also the place from which voices emerge … The echo is a form of sound inscribed in time and produced in certain contexts favourable to the reflection of an original sound…