Are we not blind? Are we not reckless? We are two desperate young women; we are in love. And love, as we know, is a form of madness.
MARIA AND I ARE MAKING up a bed for Cornelis in the room opposite mine. It is called the Leather Room; he sometimes uses it as a study. It is chilly in here, but then all our rooms are chilly. The walls are lined with stamped leather; dark landscapes hang there, views by Hans Bols and Gillis van Coninxloo. There is a heavy cupboard crammed with porcelain jars from China.
As we plump up the pillows Cornelis comes in. He strokes his beard. “It is a small price to pay,” he says. He is so happy, it should break my heart. “Let Maria do that,” he says. “You must look after yourself.”
Suddenly Maria clutches her stomach. With a heaving grunt she rushes out. She is going to vomit. She has been vomiting all week.
I hastily follow her into what is now my bedchamber and close the door. Maria grabs the nightpot, just in time, and vomits noisily into it. I stand behind her, supporting her head in my hands and stroking her forehead.
When she is finished we hear a tap at the door. “Are you all right, my dear?” calls Cornelis.
Maria and I look at each other. Quick as a flash she shoves the pot into my hands.
Cornelis comes in. He takes one look at the vessel— there is a foul smell—and says: “My poor dearest.”
“It is only natural, in the first months,” I reply. “It is a small price to pay.”
I carry the pot to the door. He stops me. “Let the maid do that.” He glares at Maria. “Maria!”
I hand Maria the pot. Eyes lowered, she takes it from me and carries it downstairs.
AND SO BEGIN the strangest months of my life. Looking back, from beyond my death, I see a woman hurtling downstream on the current, as helpless as a twig. She is too young to think where she is going; she is too blind with passion to think about tomorrow. Someone might betray her; she knows this is only too possible. She might even betray herself. God waits in judgment. He is the one she has most profoundly betrayed. But she locks that muscle in her heart. Not now, she thinks. Not yet.
I HAVE INVENTED a doctor—a man recommended by my singing teacher, whom Cornelis has never met. My husband is anxious about my condition; he wants his own physician to attend me but I’ve persuaded him otherwise. He bends to my every wish. He humors me; he treats me like a precious piece of Wan-Li porcelain.
In these early weeks Maria craves cloves. I tell Cornelis of my craving. He brings home marzipan pastries, flavored with cloves. Maria devours them in the kitchen. He orders Maria to prepare hippocras—spiced wine made with cloves—and watches me fondly as I drink. Alone in the kitchen Maria drinks the dregs.
For I do, in fact, almost believe it myself. After all, I am a woman; I have been created for motherhood. Since girlhood I have been brought up with this in mind and my condition seems so natural, after three years of marriage, that I can almost convince myself it is real. As the weeks pass I am discovering in myself a capacity for self-deception. This in itself is not surprising; since I have become an adulteress I have learned how to dissemble. I have become an actress in the most dangerous theater of all—my home. And I have not yet reached the stage of all-too-solid deceit—strapping a pillow around my waist—I have not yet faced that. This phantom pregnancy, so far, is an abstraction—nausea and a craving for cloves.
Maria and I are close—closer than I have been to my sisters, close in a way nobody else could comprehend. Only Jan knows our secret. Maria suffers from sickness—not in the mornings but later in the day. I hear her retching in the kitchen and run in to hold her clammy forehead. I feel responsible for her convulsions, as if I have caused them; I feel it should be me who suffers. In fact, I do feel nauseous too.
She is carrying my child and our complicity binds us together. We are locked in this house with our secret. These silent rooms, bathed in light through the colored glass— they guard our treachery. Our only witnesses are the faces that gaze from the paintings—King David; a peasant raising a tankard; our own selves, Cornelis and me, posed in our former life. These are our mute collaborators.
When we’re alone, our positions are reversed. I look after Maria; I am her servant. If she is tired I put her to bed in the wall; I scour the cooking pots and sweep the floor before my husband returns. “Polish the candle sticks,” she bosses, “he always notices.”
To the outside world, however, she is my servant and I am a pregnant wife. Cornelis, the proud father-to-be, has told the news to our friends and acquaintances. Blushing, I have accepted their congratulations. Our neighbor Mrs. Molenaer has sent around an herbal infusion to ease my sickness. “It will disappear after three months,” she says. “It always does.”
I give it to Maria, who drinks it. She says it makes her feel even worse. Later Mrs. Molenaer visits and asks if I am feeling better. “Oh, yes,” I reply as Maria, her face gray, serves us pastries. But who notices a servant?
“When is the confinement?” asks Mrs. Molenaer. “When is the happy day?”
“In November.”
“Your family lives in Utrecht, am I right? They must be very happy at the news.”
“Oh, they are.”
“Will your mother attend the birth?”
“My mother is unwell. I doubt that she could undertake the journey.”
Why so many questions? They make me nervous. A woman in my condition is the focus of attention; I hope it will not last. I feel a cheat, of course, as if I have copied out someone else’s verse and been praised for writing it myself. I need all my energies to keep my wits. My family, for instance. Cornelis believes that I have sent a letter to my mother and sisters, telling them the happy news. Out of cowardice I have put this off. I will have to pretend, at some point, that I have received a reply. And soon he will be expecting at least one of my sisters to visit—after all, Utrecht is but twenty-five miles distant. Luckily he is out most of the day, at his warehouse in the harbor. I shall have to concoct a visit while he is at work.
IT IS THE STRANGEST SENSATION, that Maria is pregnant with my baby. I have stepped into the world of motherhood and I am now noticing children in the street, gazing at them with a maternal interest. In our country we show affection to our offspring; in fact, foreigners remark that we treat them with excessive indulgence. Rather than being consigned to the care of nursemaids, our Dutch children are brought up in the bosom of the family. Opposite my front door, across the canal, the houses catch the sunlight in the morning. A woman brings her child outside. She watches it take its first steps. Along the street the trees are misted green; new life is beginning. She swoops the child up and holds it close. I can hear her laughter, echoing across the canal. This affects me deeply. She is my phantom self with my phantom child. This is the lost life that I should have been leading with my husband. Treacherous water, however, separates us, and I cannot reach her now.
“Lord, this is heavy!” Indoors, Maria attempts to lift a bucket of peat. I take it from her. She giggles. I know she is using me but I do not mind. She must not lose this baby. She is not being attended by a doctor; she only has me. While I have all the attention, she has to cope alone. And it is she who will face, alone, the unimaginable terrors of childbirth. Sometimes, burdened with my lies, I forget this. There is danger ahead for both of us, but only she will bear the pain.
I empty the peat into the box beside the fireplace. My arms ache—it is hard work, being a servant. “Feel my tieten—they’re getting bigger.” Maria is two months gone. Ignoring my blushes, she grabs my hand and lays it on her breast. I have never felt her before, so I cannot tell. Besides, she is a buxom girl.
“There’s storks nesting on the chimney down the road,” she says. “That’s good luck.” She is drinking some concoction of cow’s urine and dung; she buys it from an old woman in the market. She is in thrall to country superstitions—around her neck she wears a charm: a walnut shell with a spider’s head inside, to ward off fever. Before, I would have laughed at thi
s—I come from a middle-class, educated family; we were taught to ridicule such things— but now she has drawn me into her world. I want to believe her magic, for only a miracle will see us through. We are bound together by sorcery.
It is May. The evenings are balmy. On warm days the canals stink, but over them drifts the scent of blossoms. In the gardens, tulips sound their silent trumpets; irises have unfurled between their swords. Even the house seems pregnant with new life. On the wall hangs Cornelis’s lute, swollen like a fruit; on the kitchen shelves stand the big-bellied stoneware jars.
RELEASED FROM CORNELIS’S EMBRACES, my passion for Jan grows stronger. I surrender myself to him with my whole heart. Nowadays I visit his studio in broad daylight. Of course I am careful; I make sure nobody sees me slipping through the door. My hood hides my face. But I have grown in confidence. My great deception has made me reckless. One huge lie and I have stepped over a threshold into another world; a criminal must feel this, after he has killed for the first time. And look! I have got away with it. Nobody has found me out, not yet. There is no going back now; I am caught in the momentum of my crime. I feel exhilarated by my wicked success.
Jan shuts his pupil into the kitchen. He has set up a still life for Jacob there, an ontbijtje, or breakfast table—half-eaten ham, earthenware mustard pot, grapes. Jacob wants to add a butterfly—“To symbolize the carefree life of the soul,” he says, “after it is free from fleshly desires.”
“Just paint a breakfast,” says Jan.
“What about a peeled lemon, so beautiful, yet sour inside?”
“Just look at what’s on the table,” says Jan. “Look at the luster of the grapes. Isn’t that enough? Find beauty in what you see, not what it can teach us.”
Jacob is an earnest young man. How can he detach objects from their sermonizing properties? To paint earthly beauty, just for itself, is to deny the presence of God. Jacob already considers Jan disreputable. He knows there is something going on between us, and me a married woman. Ah, what would he think if he knew the truth?
Jan closes the door on his pupil. He is going to paint me. He has finished The Love Letter. I smuggled it into the house and hid it in the attic. That was his love letter to me, one I will never tear up. Now, in his studio, he paints me naked. I disrobe myself, peeling off my clothes like an onion skin. But the tears in my eyes are caused by happiness.
“Shall I tell you how much I love you?” I ask, lying on the bed. “When I see a leek, my heart leaps. Do you know why?”
“Why, my sweetest heart, my darling love? Move your arm up—there, just like that.”
“Because I was drinking leek soup when I first heard your name. Jan van Loos, he will make me immortal.”
“And I will! Leave your husband, Sophia; come and live with me.”
“How can I leave my husband when I am carrying his child?” I laugh.
Jan is shocked. How can I talk so lightly? “Sooner or later you’ll be found out; it’s only a matter of time.”
“Why should I be found out?”
“What’s going to happen when the child is born? Are you going to pass it off as your own and go on living with your husband?”
I cannot contemplate this. I cannot bear to think about the future.
“What are we going to do,” he asks, “now we have started this?”
“If I run away with you, he’ll discover I have been cheating. Besides, where can we go? We cannot stay here, and if we move to another town you will be unable to work; your guild forbids it.” This is true. To protect their members, the Guilds of St. Luke are closed to painters from other towns; they are unable to sell their work until they’ve been established there for several years.
Now it is Jan’s turn to be reckless. “We’ll leave the country. We’ll sail to the East Indies.”
“The East Indies?”
“We’ll escape from this life and start again, you and I— we’ll sail across the world and nobody will be able to reach us.” He clasps me in his arms. “My love, we’ll be happy.”
So the seed is sown. Jan talks about sunshine and ultramarine skies. “Mountains—can you picture them?” He has heard travelers’ tales of the colony. “And trees chattering with parrots. The sun shines all the year round. We won’t need money—besides, what happiness has money brought you? We will lie as naked as God intended under the palm trees and I will rub your beautiful long body with myrrh.”
At this stage it is still a dream—as foreign as the exotic prints my father used to show me. Too many obstacles lie in our path. I look at Jan—his darling face, his wild hair, the red velvet beret crammed on his head; his battered boots, his paint-streaked jerkin. I try to imagine him surrounded by palm trees but my imagination fails me. There are too many oceans to cross.
Meanwhile he paints me: Woman on a Bed. I lie there, shivering in the cold. He paints fast, on a wooden panel. He gazes at me as if I am an object—that rapt impersonal gaze I remember from when he painted my portrait. When we speak, however, his face softens; he returns to himself. In his eyes I see one kind of love replaced by another.
Outside stretches the noisy city—bells ringing, horses neighing, carts rattling past. Here all is silent concentration. The water’s reflection ripples on the walls; it dances like my dancing heart. I lie propped on his pillows, on the bed where I have found greater joy than I believed possible. My heart is full. I know that I will leave my husband and come to him; I’ve known this for weeks. In fact, I knew it the moment Jan stepped into my house.
He says: “Whatever happens to us, this painting will not lie. It will tell the truth.”
29
The Painting
To ornament a single piece most dearly ’Tis best by sundry means to improvise Accessories that its deck’d gist revealeth An artful play on art it doth comprise.
—S. VAN HOOGSTRAETEN, 1678
Nearby, in his house in the Jodenbreestraat, Rembrandt, too, is painting a naked woman lying on a bed. Curtains are pulled back to reveal Danaë, dressed only in bracelets, propped on a pile of pillows. She waits for Zeus to descend on her in a shower of golden rain.
The painting is drenched in gold—gold curtains, weeping golden cherub, the golden warmth of the woman’s skin. But where is the rain, and can that approaching lover be truly a god? It looks more like an old servant.
She hangs in the Hermitage, the loveliest nude he has ever painted. But if not Danaë, who is she? She has been Rachel Awaiting Tobias; in later years she became Venus Awaiting Mars. She has been Delilah Awaiting Samson and Sara Awaiting Abraham.
At that time Rembrandt was deeply in love with his young wife, Saskia. Could this just be a woman, radiant with desire, waiting for her husband?
This same year, 1636, Salomon van Ruysdael paints River Landscape with Ferry. Livestock is being herded onto a ferry; the water is glassy, reflecting the sky. It is a painting free from mythology—it depicts no souls crossing the Styx, just cows crossing a river to get to better pasture on the other side. It tells no story but its own.
And meanwhile, in Haarlem, Pieter Claesz is painting a Little Breakfast—a herring on a pewter plate, a roll, some crumbs. It is a painting of transcendent beauty, with no lessons to be learned. Art for art’s sake.
Painters are simply artisans; they are suppliers of goods. Pictures on a grand theme—history or religious subjects—are sold for the highest prices. Next come landscapes and seascapes, priced according to their detail, then portraits and genre paintings—merry companies, interiors, tavern scenes. Finally, at the bottom of the scale are the still lifes.
Jan’s painting, however, has no value. Its category is immaterial for it is not for sale. He works fast, with bold brush strokes, for soon Sophia must leave and he wants to capture her, now, just as she is. Besides, she is chilly.
Centuries later she will hang in the Rijksmuseum. Scholars will quarrel about her identity. Is she Venus? Is she Delilah? Papers will be published about her place in van Loos’s work. Ordinary peopl
e will wonder: who is she? His mistress? A model? Surely not a model, for she gazes out of the painting with such frank love.
She will have no title. She will just be known as Woman on a Bed. Because that is what she is.
30
Cornelis
Thou hast begot children not only for thy selfe, but also for thy countrie, which should not only bee to thy self a joy and pleasure,but also profitable and commodius afterwardes unto the common wealth.
—BARTHOLOMEW BATTY, The Christian Man’s Closet, 1581
Cornelis is down in his vault. The room is used for storage—wood, peat, old possessions. It is dark down here; he has lit an oil lamp. His whole house is now in shadow, for summer has arrived and the linden tree outside is heavy with foliage. It is July; his wife is five months pregnant and her belly is starting to swell. Yesterday he asked if the baby was kicking yet. He stretched out his hand to touch her but she moved away. “Not yet,” she said. “It is not kicking yet.”
How can she understand his anxiety? She is young. God willing, she will never know what it is like to lose a child. She knows of his loss, of course, but the young cannot imagine the unimaginable; their blind confidence is a kind of solace. He needs to be reassured, however, that a living child lies beneath her gown; he needs kicking proof. For in the past God has offered him happiness, only to snatch it away.
Down in the vault Cornelis unlocks the chest. It is made of teak, imported from the East Indies, and veneered with copper; he hasn’t touched it for years; it belongs to another life. He lifts the lid and gazes at the baby clothes. A scent of sweet woodruff is released; the herb, brittle as dust now, is strewn among the woolen robes. He lifts out tiny vests and jackets. He lifts out Pieter’s velvet doublet and presses it to his nose. His son’s smell has long since gone.
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