It was time for me to come up with my suggestion. Cautiously, scared as I was of making myself look ridiculous. The point was, in our house, religion had always been on a par with sexuality in the sense that it was something private, not really taboo, but private. You didn’t talk about it, end of story.
‘Have you heard that Jesus is coming to Brussels?’
‘That’s all they talk about.’
‘Would it be interesting to be there when he goes through the streets?’
Finally she took her eyes off the stupid, mind-numbing TV. She looked straight at me as if trying to decide what to do: laugh out loud or give me an earful.
She dangled her false teeth in the middle of her mouth, a tic she always had when weighing her words, and finally said, ‘All those people standing on the side of the road three weeks in advance aren’t very sure of themselves. People who believe they’ll have plenty of opportunity to see God don’t need to go to all kinds of lengths to catch a quick glimpse of Him during their earthly existence.’
Needless to say, her answer surprised me. I had anticipated all kinds of things, but never such a sharp analysis. When, just a few hours after this declaration, my mother died unexpectedly in her sleep with a blissful smile on her face the like of which the coffin maker had never seen on a client before, my astonishment was complete.
And so it was that in a period I should remember as one of the most beautiful in my already fairly advanced life, I found myself lowering my mother’s body into the soil of Evere Cemetery.
At Dupont, the nearby café where mourners often go to con sole themselves with rabbit stew and a Trappist beer, I ate a carré confiture and felt, appropriately or not, inexplicably happy. In the days ahead I had to clear out an apartment in which I might find a photo of the man who could be my father, a letter too perhaps, and I would liberate a canary from its horrible cage.
Fourth Station
Since 1698 Brussels has had its very own way of declaring its love for someone – namely, dressing the city’s best-known statue up as the object of veneration. Manneken Pis – and what other statue could I be talking about? – has already let his pee splash into the fountain on the Rue de l’Étuve decked out as Elvis Presley and Nelson Mandela. As Baden Powell, Mozart, Columbus, a footballer from Racing Anderlecht, a wearer of the Tour de France yellow jersey, as Saint Nicholas, you name it … The curly-headed urchin has offended public decorum by day and by night in so many guises. Anyone who has seen this bronze softy demonstrating his perfectly groomed prostate in his capacity as French crooner Maurice Chevalier will find it impossible to listen to ‘I Wonder Where My Baby Is Tonight’ again without thinking of a willy so puny it couldn’t offend a withered old nun.
Paris has the Eiffel Tower; Rome, the Trevi Fountain. For a long time it bothered me that we were stuck with a nude pisser as our national symbol, as if we were trying to hide our lack of ambition behind cheap bums-and-tits humour. I was equally incapable of understanding why tours from all corners of the globe led to this statue, just fifty-eight centimetres tall, something you’d walk past at a flea market without batting an eyelid.
But I became cheerful, very cheerful, when I suddenly saw our Manneken dressed up as Christ with a halo on his head, fishing his widdler up out of his loincloth and peeing, peeing constantly with one hand on his hip and his knees bent slightly to admire what his tummy would otherwise conceal. The penny dropped and I realised that there was no better way of symbolising a sense of liberation than with this statue of a pisser. A male pisser, a young pisser, because he hasn’t lost the habit of making sure that his jet arches up so that it can surrender to gravity properly, knowing that its ballistic glory will be cherished. All at once I found this unsightly icon of my equally unsightly country much more triumphant than all the heroes hacked out of marble in the centre of Florence. Triumphant and full of joie de vivre. And I counted my blessings at living in a place where no wars were going to break out because our primary prophet, from a cultural-historical point of view, had been depicted with his pee-pee showing. No outraged preachers screaming blue murder and demanding the reintroduction of the fig leaf in the visual arts. Our Lord’s pecker did not shock us. If Giovanni Bellini could already entrust Jesus’s minuscule kiddy’s dick to canvas in the Early Renaissance – as if the painter wanted to emphasise God’s becoming human by endowing him so poorly in the one area where every man, and every woman too actually, is always happy to see a few grams extra – why should we kick up a fuss so many centuries later about a Jesus who didn’t feel obliged to hide a single centimetre of Creation?
And, in keeping with Brussels city council policy for all highly exceptional occasions, now too the fountain’s pipes were connected to a keg of beer. Until the day of Christ’s arrival, Manneken Pis would swathe himself in a halo and loincloth and colour the basin in the Rue de l’Étuve amber.
Speaking for my own generation – the children of the sixties, years that are invariably commemorated on record covers with golden adjectives – I can only say that hope drove us to the point of delirium at the sight of this Manneken Pis. It was forgivable. We had been hurled into the world just when it seemed ready to take revenge on the past. Evil had been purged from mankind with plastic, bubble gum and rock ’n’ roll. That was why Germany got to organise the Olympic Games again in ’72, to wash away all memories of the propagandist edition of 1936. With renewed naivety – and unfortunately that’s the right word, as much as I would like to see things differently – mankind raised its morale with the belief that sport could bring nations closer together and that the path to freedom ran over a 400-metre track. But no matter how much hockey people played or how they excelled in badminton, no matter how fast they swam or how high they jumped, the dream of brotherhood burst when Palestinian terrorists caused a bloodbath and sent the Israeli team home with more coffins than medals. We became acquainted with a new reality of terrorist attacks; police stations swapped their ticket books for PSG1 sniper rifles. In our childhood memories, we eat sausages and sprouts with nutmeg in front of the TV: car bombs and hijacked planes are the newsreader’s subjects and our meal tastes none the worse for it. Death tolls roll past like lotto numbers, hostage dramas are our daily fare. Military superpowers threaten to top each other with their all-obliterating nuclear arsenals. And the emaciated Biafran with his gut full of extra-cellular fluid rattles his mess tin as if to say, ‘Here I am again, your quiz show’s about to start. Thanks for watching, see you tomorrow!’
Industry turned against its manpower, the ranks of the unemployed swelled, the prosperous Valhalla our parents had lit up with jukebox lights had disappeared. We were confronted by new preachers and followers of the racism that had caused so much damage forty years earlier that Europe still hadn’t recovered. Gruff and numb and dumb, we resigned ourselves to the role that the end of the filthiest century seemed to be imposing on us.
I was a young man, in the years of my first shaving brush, when my faith in the species unexpectedly revived. Sure, you can put it down to my youthful and defective comprehension of mankind, but still, when the apartheid system collapsed in South Africa, the Cold War was scrapped from the script of the Apocalypse, the Berlin Wall was demolished, velvet revolutions gave the people a voice … what was left of my inner utopian rose up and caught the scent of complete vindication at very close quarters. Ideologically, these were my glory days – I’m not ashamed to admit it and I genuinely believe that I’m also speaking for many of my contemporaries. People who had come across as totally apathetic all through university suddenly started wearing Amnesty International T-shirts – without the slightest hint of irony. It was like we were being softened up first to increase the impact of the next blow. Because shortly afterwards, Rwanda demonstrated that genocide only needs 100 days and a few machetes to make the electoral roll a million names lighter. And despite the solemn promise chiselled into so many statues and columns erected after the end of World War II, Srebrenica proved that mass deportations a
nd executions of poor wretches because of their religion, origin or colour were still the order of the day. And the rest of the globe still couldn’t give a monkey’s! That was the deathblow for my, for our optimistic humanism. We became the famous lost generation, burying itself in middle-class comforts – egotistical, uninspired. The political parties were only too happy to recruit their leaders from our embittered ranks, nobody was interested in the future.
Did we bask in our misery? Absolutely! But out of nowhere a light appeared in our lacklustre days. We felt liberated from the triviality of our banal existences. Or let me just speak for myself, that would be far more honest: I felt liberated from the triviality of my banal existence. And that feeling, which I became more and more conscious of as I stood there in the Rue de l’Étuve, was so striking and – frankly – moving, that I did something I had never thought possible: I walked into a souvenir shop and bought myself a Manneken Pis replica. Thirty euros for a plastic knockoff. The shop assistant was baffled: normally she only ever sold them to tourists; today it had been almost all locals.
Fifth Station
In Belgium it’s easier to find a parliamentarian than someone who can sharpen your tools for you. Our country boasts no less than six parliaments – at least when all of our chosen representatives are capable of forming a government simultaneously. A federal government, a Walloon regional government, a Flemish government, a government for the Brussels-Capital region, a government of the French community and a government of the German-speaking community. That’s quite something. Six – I repeat, six! – different governments for a nation that occupies at most 30,000 km2 – smaller than Bhutan, smaller than Guinea-Bissau – ensuring 537 parliamentary pay packets each month. And on top of that, 48 ministers and 10 state secretaries pocket fat salaries, money that could have been used for something else. Some ministers job-hop from one government to another during a single term, which doesn’t simplify the wage calculations. Suffice to say that the structure of our state institutions is a favourite subject for examiners with sadistic tendencies, and few words appear as frequently in our editorials as ‘Kafkaesque’.
On travels abroad in recent years I’d noticed having to explain more and more often that we weren’t in the throes of civil war. The discrepancy between the political discourse and civil life could hardly have been more glaring. Flemings and Walloons weren’t at each other’s throats: our bricklayers worked together on the same building sites, and the walls they built stood straight and true; the orchestra of La Monnaie was made up of musicians from north and south, but they still managed to play La Finta Giardiniera in the same key; people married across the language borders and started households in which the doors slammed and the pots banged neither more nor less often than in other homes, they found the same warmth, the same chill in each other’s arms. But still our biggest loudmouths shouted the populist slogans that gave outsiders the opposite impression and scared off crucial investors.
Be that as it may, it was time to start thinking about an official delegation, bigwigs who would share the stage with Christ and press His flesh for the photographers who would undoubtedly turn out in large numbers for the occasion. It was the Flemish ministers who pounded the table first, to no-one’s surprise. First and hardest. Brussels was their capital, basta. After all, the Walloon prime minister resided in the Elysette of Namur where, when the wind was right, he could hear the wild boars grunting in the nearby woods. The Flemish Parliament, on the other hand, was located in the capital on the Boulevard du Roi Albert II, where modern-day Mary Magdalenes climbed into dark cars of an evening. Furthermore, and for the northerners this was totally decisive, the Flemish people were closer to God than the Walloons! Their commitment to God and Flanders had always been absolute. More than a century ago, in the days when the spelling was progressive if nothing else, they had summarised their total dedication to Flanders and Christ with the slogan ‘Alles Voor Vlaanderen, Vlaanderen Voor Kristus’, a credo that was perfectly suited to arch mispronunciation when being sung during parades and that, as AVVVVK, provided work in flag makers’ studios for many a letter embroiderer. Every year, four or so coaches full of rabid advocates of Flemish independence, accompanied by two priests and a thurible of incense and gripped by the notion that the Creator looked favourably on their separatist ideals, headed off to the polder to pray in the open, well-fertilised air, then do their best to evoke the sentiments of an oppressed minority. Drum rolls and flag-waving were useful aids. When, elsewhere on their calendar, their delight regarding their cultural identity had swollen to such proportions that they had to sing it out, they would gather in the Antwerp sports hall to roar ‘On the Purple Heath’, ‘Lights Shining on the Scheldt’ and ‘Mieke Grab the Branches of the Trees’, interspersed – it’s true – with other, more profane sing-along material. Wallonia, on the other hand, had fumigated its faith with industrial smog, the pealing of its church bells had been dulled by the sulphurous haze. The point being: ‘Walloons have no business trying to come before Christ at all and definitely not in Brussels!’
Still, if you went looking for a book shop in the shade of the Atomium, you’d find a lot more librairies than boekhandels, and in the bedrooms people made l’amour considerably more often than de liefde. You would, in other words, have to spend a long time searching the area around Central Station before finding someone who yodelled ‘Lights Shining on the Scheldt’ while lathering his perm under the shower. Of all the brides-to-be getting a quick hymen reconstruction on the sly in Brussels hospitals, there were very few who were able to hum the tune of ‘Our Lady of Flanders’. Let alone sing it in Dutch.
(… ‘Our Lady of Flanders’: the magnum opus of composer Lodewijk de Vocht. One couldn’t help but wonder in which prefab neighbourhood, in which car park of which horticultural supplies depot the man’s statue stood …And how many pigeons had already shat it to the point of unrecognisability …)
But that a true delegation of the city and nation would include French speakers was beyond question.
And that forgotten percentile of German-speaking Belgians – always quiet, withdrawn and unassuming in their grassy corner, denizens of no-man’s land who understood that life, essentially, is all about filling milk churns – suddenly they too spoke up loud and clear to demand a role in the ceremonial proceedings related to the reception of Our Lord.
And so our policy-makers slipped back into the time-honoured practice of inter-community squabbling, the thing they loved to hide behind to avoid having to discuss the potholes in our roads, the affordability of our educations, the pollutants in our soil and the decrepitude of our nuclear reactors.
It wasn’t just the nation – the capital too was crumbled up into a confusing plethora of executive levels. No less than nineteen bellies in this one city were wrapped with a mayoral sash. Brussels was a patchwork quilt of different municipalities, each with a vision that wasn’t allowed to extend beyond its own kerb. Until now. Because all at once the mayor of Uccle felt like a purebred Bruxellois, even though he didn’t have to promise anyone who lived there anything to strengthen his electoral basis. And he insisted on a VIP badge and a seat at Christ’s right hand on the big day, which might perhaps be the Day of Judgment itself.
When you consider that the MEPs were also claiming the right to a personal consultation with Jesus, it’s easy to understand the despondency surrounding the organisation of the event.
It was hardly surprising: everyone of any name or fame was dying to be photographed next to a man who shared his DNA with God Almighty. Any deeds of nobility that could be conjured up were worthwhile; there was no arse so filthy it wasn’t worth kissing; no pride too small or too big that it couldn’t be pushed aside to clear the way for some craven toadying. It would be going too far to sum up all of the initiatives taken by shameless individuals, but if one case can serve as an example of all the ridiculous goings-on, then let it be known far and wide that the president of FC Brussels changed the date of the friendly against St
andard de Liège’s reserve team to the twenty-first of July in the hope that no-one less that the Son of God would take the honorary kick-off.
*
For once, the leaders of the permanent provisional federal government were called back from foreign holiday resorts not to allay a crisis, but to arrange a happy event. They put together a special commission, and to everyone’s amazement they did it so quickly that the television producers’ hopes of an animated debate were nipped in the bud.
The Val-Duchesse priory had proved itself many times before as an appropriate location for momentous negotiations. It was there that they philosophised their way through every last article of the Treaty of Rome in 1957, adding the finishing touch to what would later become the European Union. Ailing governments went there to break their fall; agreements that had been considered impossible were reached. According to initiates, it was because of the fireplace with its inspirational crackling. Others put it down to the park, where brains could suck up a dose of oxygen before making a difficult decision. And it was also due, undeniably, to the estate’s kitchen. Duo de langoustine et homard en carpaccio à la citronnelle; Limande aux petits gris de Namur, fin bouillon aux lentins de chêne et à la ciboulette chinoise; Saint-Jacques poêlées aux lentilles vertes du Puy, roulade de concombre aux huïtres plates de Colchester, Poule faine à la fine champagne et sa garniture hivernale … You can’t make peace when people are hungry. The most pig-headed of Flemish radicals would drop all linguistic demands at the sight of this menu, opening his mouth wide while already undoing the top button of his trousers as a precautionary measure. As a result, there wasn’t a single commission member who showed any signs of sorrow about having to withdraw into gastronomic isolation for the duration of the negotiations.
Christ’s Entry Into Brussels Page 3
