Magnus by Sylvie Germain Read Free Book Online

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.

Note
    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

Fragment 10
    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