Magnus by Sylvie Germain Read Free Book Online Page B

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.

Sequence
    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