Fragment 21
One day he finally decides to take to the laundry the damask tablecloth he extracted from the dustbin that Peggy left outside her empty house. When he gets it home, he opens it out to see whether the cleaning has restored its satin-like smoothness and ivory colour. The wine- and sauce-stains have been washed out, but not completely; they have faded into faint rings of pale pink and amber superimposed on the patterns in the cloth. They are suggestive of some inchoate bloom, like faded flowers emerging from the morning mist.
Having studied at length these floral designs and traced their indistinct outline with his fingertip, he re-encounters them in his dreams the following night.
He sees Peggy as she was when they were last together: wearing her light flowing dress, spangled with tiny flowers and butterflies. And suddenly, as in his adolescent dreams when he burned with desire for Peggy, he sees her start to sway, to twirl round in circles — not increasing fast, but more widely expanding — and her dress begins to ripple gently, to rise and open up in a big corolla. And now this dress, dotted with little flowers and insects, is floating round the middle of her body, encompassing that white belly, those slender hips and bare buttocks with a halo of softly radiating light. Her sex is no longer the shape of a sun-like thistle, as in the past, but of a peony with its countless petals closed.
And now the flowers detach themselves from the fabric, the butterflies take flight and dance in slow motion; the dress evaporates, leaving only a milky nimbus, veined with streaks of orange-yellow, round the naked woman’s waist. Her breasts are beautiful, small and perfectly rounded, their areola the colour of fresh hazelnuts and the nipples themselves like the hazelnut kernel. Her skin is sprinkled with little freckles, unless they are the ocelli of butterfly wings. With a quivering of petals the peony opens up, a mere fraction. And there the dream ends, unfulfilled.
No, the dream does not end, it takes another turn, becomes transformed. Peggy has disappeared, or rather her body has faded to the verge of invisibility, rather as the washed-out stains on the damask have become misty hints of colour, floral intimations. Only the peony remains, like a clenched fist relaxing, then closing again. No, like a beating heart.
He cannot see Peggy any more, all he can make out is a heart palpitating in the emptiness, just surfacing out of the milky fog. And he can hear the dull monotonous pounding of this suspended heart. The more visually spare his dream becomes, the more it gains in resonance.
Is it enough to dream of someone for that person then to remember you and make contact after a long silence? The fact is that a week later Magnus receives a letter from Peggy. For all these months, she writes, she has remained devastated by what happened during that dinner at her house, already then no longer a home to her. But devastated by what exactly, she wonders. Her twofold shame, redoubled by having to confess to the shame she had felt since Tim’s death? Remorse for her own culpability for that death? Her inability to provide any explanation whatsoever for the tragedy? Or bewilderment at the strange phenomenon that occurred that evening in Magnus’s presence, which she still does not understand? She does not believe in ghosts or haunted houses, but she does believe in the strength of feelings, good or bad, when they rise to a pitch of intensity; in the power of emotions, especially if forcibly concealed; in the energy of certain ideas, especially if brutally silenced. The flesh then saturated with all this contained energy, and the heart too sore from things unspoken, from lies, fears, and regrets, gasping for breath eventually cry out all that could not, would not be said. Yes, for months she has lived in a daze of stupefaction, struggling to keep up appearances in front of her colleagues and students at the institute where she teaches. But three days ago all of a sudden the weight bearing down on her was lifted, she was released from the permanent grip of anxiety. She does not know how or why, and is not attempting to explain it. She is simply noting the change, the relief; this first step towards deliverance. But, for all that, without forgetting or denying or refusing to acknowledge anything of what happened — her responsibility for Tim’s death, her gradual aversion towards him that turned to repulsion, then cold deadly hatred. Have you ever experienced that slow distortion of love, she asks Magnus, and adds that it is something she hopes he has never had to live through, and never will.
And in these last three days, she continues in her letter, she has the impression of having covered more ground than in several decades. The impression of picking up again, moving forward, without trying to hide her guilt behind her back any more, but bearing it in her arms like some small animal certainly mortally wounded but that she does not despair of saving.
It is in order to tell him all this that she is writing to him today, and to thank him for having, knowingly or not, stoked the madness that was smouldering inside her, making it burst into flame, burn itself out. And never mind, she adds, if all this seems confused, it was something she had to tell him.
Finally, she writes, if he should ever have the desire to visit Vienna one day, she would be delighted to see him again. She even goes so far as to say she is renting an apartment big enough to accommodate guests.
Her letter ends with this invitation, both warm and vague. Magnus soon makes it definite: he decides to go to Vienna the following month.
Sequence
‘A grey ox in China
lying in the stable
stretches its backbone
and at the same moment
an ox in Uruguay
looks round to see
if someone has stirred.
Flying over both of them
through day and night
is the bird that silently
circles the planet
and never touches it
and never comes to rest.’
Jules Supervielle, ‘A grey ox in China…’
The Innocent Convict
Fragment 22
The first time they faced each other naked, Magnus felt the ground shift under his feet. All his dreams from the past suddenly gathered in a solid mass shattering the reality that had finally come into being. Peggy’s body was already so familiar to him this sudden revelation seemed like an absurdity, an assault. And his desire for her was panicked to the point of collapsing into impotence. His own body failed him.
Lying beside her on the bed, he hardly dared look at her, caress her. His vision was blurred, with images of Peggy’s nudity contemplated in his dreams overlaying the very real vision that presented itself to him; images that rippled over her skin, making it untouchable. Peggy took his hand and laid it on her breast, gently holding it there. She did not say anything. She smiled at him, waiting for the emotion that paralysed him and made him tremble to subside. But his emotion intensified. Magnus felt his hand grow heavier, practically weld itself to Peggy’s breast. And his sense of touch became confused with his hearing. His palm could hear her heartbeats and these pulsations spread through his whole body, all listening and resonance. He shivered as though in the grip of a high fever.
This heart beating beneath his palm, ringing in his blood, was not just that of Peggy now, it was a palimpsest of sound — in which May’s heart released indistinct echoes, calling to him, reminding him.