III - PHILIP TAADS 1973
The Philosophy of Tea . . . is a moral geometry, inasmuch as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe
OKAKURA KAKUZO The Book of Tea
Ne pas naître est sans contredit la meilleure formule qui soit. Elle n'est malheureusement à la portée de personne
To fail to be born is incontestably the best formula possible. Unfortunately it does not lie within any person's reach
E. M. CIORAN De l'inconvénent d'être né
PHILIP TAADS 1973
THERE WERE DAYS, thought Inni Wintrop, when it seemed as if a recurrent, fairly absurd phenomenon were trying to prove that the world is an absurdity that can best be approached with nonchalance, because life would otherwise become unbearable.
There were days, for instance, when you kept meeting cripples, days with too many blind people, days when you saw three times in succession a left shoe lying by the roadside. It seemed as if all these things were trying to mean something, but could not. They left only a vague sense of unease, as if somewhere there existed a dark plan for the world that allowed itself to be hinted at only in this clumsy way.
The day on which he was destined to meet Philip Taads, of whose existence he had hitherto been unaware, was the day of the three doves. The dead one, the live one, and the dazed one, which could not possibly have been one and the same, because he had seen the dead one first. These three, he thought later, had made an attempt at annunciation that had succeeded insofar as it had made the encounter with Taads the Younger more mysterious.
It was now 1973, and Inni had turned forty in a decade he did not approve of. One ought not, he felt, to live in the second half of any century, and this particular century was altogether bad. There was something sad and at the same time ridiculous about all these fading years piling on top of one another until at last the millennium arrived. And they contained a contradiction, too: in order to reach the hundred, and in this case the thousand, that had to be completed, one had to add them up; but the feeling that went with the process seemed to have more to do with subtraction. It was as if no one, especially not Time, could wait for those ever dustier, ever higher figures finally to be declared void by a revolution of a row of glittering, perfectly shaped noughts, whereupon they would be relegated to the scrap heap of history. The only people apparently still sure of anything in these days of superstitious expectation were the Pope, the sixth of his name already, a white-robed Italian with an unusually tormented face that faintly resembled Eichmann's, and a number of terrorists of different persuasions, who tried in vain to anticipate the great witches' cauldron. The fact that he was now forty no longer in itself bothered Inni very much.
"Forty," he said, "is the age at which you have to do everything for the third time, or else you'll have to start training to be a cross-tempered old man," and he had decided to do the latter.
After Zita, he had had a long-lasting affair with an actress who had finally, in self-preservation, turned him out of the house like an old chair.
"What I miss most about her," he said to his friend the writer, "is her absence. These people are never at home. You get addicted to that."
He now lived alone and intended to keep it that way. The years passed, but even this was noticeable only in photographs. He bought and sold things, was not addicted to drugs, smoked less than one packet of Egyptian cigarettes a day, and drank neither more nor less than most of his friends.
This was the situation on the radiant June morning when, on the bridge between the Heerenstraat and the Prinsenstraat, a dove flew straight at him as if to bore itself into his heart. Instead, it smashed against a car approaching from the Prinsengracht. The car drove on and the pigeon was left lying in the street, a grey and dusty, suddenly silly-looking little thing. A blonde-haired girl got off her bicycle and went up to the pigeon at the same time as Inni.
"Is it dead, do you think?" she asked.
He crouched down and turned the bird onto its back. The head did not turn with the rest of the body and continued to stare at the road surface.
"Finito," said Inni.
The girl put her bike away.
"I daren't pick it up," she said, "Will you?"
She used the familiar form of you. As long as they still do that, I am not yet old, thought Inni, picking up the pigeon. He did not like pigeons. They were not a bit like the image he used to have of the Holy Ghost, and the fact that all those promises of peace had never come to anything was probably their fault as well. Two white, softly cooing doves in the garden of a Tuscan villa, that was all right, but the grey hordes marching across the Dam Square with spurs on their boots (their heads making those idiotic mechanical pecking movements) could surely have nothing to do with a Spirit which had allegedly chosen that particular shape in which to descend upon Mary.
"What are you going to do with it?" asked the girl.
Inni looked around and saw on the bridge a wooden skip belonging to the Council. He went up to it. It was full of sand. Gently he laid the pigeon in it. The girl had followed him. An erotic moment. Man with dead dove, girl with bike and blue eyes. She was beautiful.
"Don't put it in there," she said. "The workmen will chuck it straight into the canal."
What does it matter whether it rots away in sand or in water, thought Inni, who often claimed he would prefer to be blown up after his death. But this was not the moment to hold a discourse on transience.
"Are you in a hurry?" he asked.
"No."
"Give me that bag then." From her handlebar hung a plastic bag, one from the Athenaeum Book Store.
"What's in there?"
"A book by Jan Wolkers."
"It can go in there then," said Inni. "There's no blood."
He put the pigeon in the bag.
"Jump on the back."
He took her bike without looking at her and rode off.
"Hey," she said. He heard her rapid footsteps and felt her jumping on the back of the bike. In the shop windows he caught brief glimpses of something that looked like happiness. Middle-aged gentleman on girl's bicycle, girl in jeans and white trainers on the back.
He rode down the Prinsengracht to the Haarlemmerdijk and from a distance saw the barriers of the bridge going down. They got off, and as the bridge slowly rose, they saw the second dove. It was sitting inside one of the open metal supports under the bridge, totally unconcerned as it allowed itself to be lifted up like a child on the Ferris wheel.
For a moment Inni felt an impulse to take the dead pigeon out of the plastic bag and lift it up like a peace offering to its slowly ascending living colleague, but he did not think the girl would like it. And besides, what would be the meaning of such a gesture? He shuddered, as usual not knowing why. The pigeon came down again and vanished invulnerably under the asphalt. They cycled on, to the Westerpark. With her small, brown hands, the girl dug a grave in the damp, black earth, somewhere in a corner.
"Deep enough?"
"For a pigeon, yes."
He laid the bird, which was now wearing its head like a hood on its back, into the hole. Together they smoothed the loose earth on top of it.
"Shall we go and have a drink?" he asked.
"All right."
Something in this minimal death, either the death itself or the summary ritual surrounding it, had made them allies. Something now had to happen, and if this something had anything to do with death, it would not be obvious. He cycled along the Nassaukade. She was not heavy. This was what pleased him most about his strange life — that when he had got up that morning, he had not known that he would now be cycling here with a girl at his back, but that such a possibility was always there. It gave him, he thought, something invincible. He looked at the faces of the men in the oncoming cars, and he knew that his life, in its absurdity, was right. Emptiness, loneliness, anxiety — these were the drawbacks — but there were also compensations, and this was one of them. She was humming softly and then fell silent. She said suddenly, as if
she had taken a decision, "This is where I live."
It was more like an order than a statement. He obeyed and followed her pointing finger into the Second Hugo de Grootstraat. With a heavy iron chain she tied her bike to a parking meter and opened a door. Without a word she led the way, up endless flights of stairs. Promiscuity in Amsterdam had a lot to do with stairs, especially in younger circles. He climbed calmly behind the trainers, regulating his breathing so that he would not be panting when they came to the top. They climbed very high indeed, to a small room with a skylight. Plants, books in an orange crate, an Elvis Presley poster, a copy of Vrij Nederland, breathtakingly tiny, white and light-blue panties strung out on a line in front of the open window. The notion, he thought, of happiness mingled with melancholy was a cliche, as was this room, as was he himself in this room. It had all happened before. It had to be longed for every time afresh, but it had already happened. She put on a record that he vaguely recognized, and turned towards him. This, he understood, was a generation that did not waste time. They put you on and they took you off like a glove, efficient actions following quick decisions. Sometimes it was more like a form of work than anything else.
She stood facing him. She was almost as tall as he, and he looked straight into her blue eyes. They stood solemnly, but with a gravity you could see the bottom of, a gravity without structure. She had not suffered yet, and that was not accidental either. Suffering, he had learned, could be refused, as it commonly was these days.
She undressed him, he undressed her, and they lay down side by side. She smelled of girl. He stroked her, and twice she pushed his hand a fraction, saying "No, not here, there," and then appeared to forget him. The body as gadget. She came without a hitch in the mechanism. There was something very sweet about it, he thought. His own performance seemed like a huge car in a narrow English country lane. A few years later, half the American car industry would slump, as a result of just such an anachronism. There was still a lot to be learned in beds. He lay still for a while and felt the small (tennis? basketball?) air-cooled hands stroking his back.
"Wow," she said. And then, "How old are you?"
He could see the handwriting in which she would enter it in her diary (no, you oaf, they don't keep diaries these days) and said, "Forty-five." It was the first thing that came into his head.
"I've never been with anyone as old as that."
Records — that was another thing they suffered from. But you could hardly blame them.
"You'd better not make a habit of it."
"I quite liked it."
An immense languor flowed through his body, but he got up. She rolled a cigarette.
"You want one?"
"No thanks."
He washed by the washstand and knew she was not looking at him. He dressed. Summer, it was soon over. Life was a happening.
"Where are you going?"
"I have to meet a friend."
It was true. He had arranged to see Bernard Roozenboom. Bernard was in his fifties. Together they were almost a hundred. Did they still call that friends at her age? He went to the bed, knelt beside her, and caressed her face.
"Shall I see you again sometime?" he asked.
"No. I have a boyfriend."
"I see." He got up. Not too quickly, because of the occasion, and not too slowly, so as not to seem too old. Then he walked out of the room on tiptoe — he did not know why but suspected the worst (my little daughter is asleep). Bye. Bye.
Not until he was several blocks away did it occur to him that neither of them had asked the other's name. He stopped and looked at a window display of electrical goods. Irons and orange squeezers stared back at him. What were names, anyway? What difference would it have made to this episode if he had known her name? None, and yet he felt there was something wrong with an age in which you could go namelessly to bed with someone. But then you've never thought otherwise, he said aloud to himself, and returned to his earlier thought: What are names? Arrangements of letters that, when you pronounce them, form a word by which you can somehow address or refer to a person. Usually these shorter or longer arrangements had distant roots in the Bible or in church history and were therefore connected, in ways that had become obscure to almost everyone, with human beings who had really lived once, which made it all the more mysterious. That you did not choose your own name was arbitrary enough, but suppose that on reaching adulthood you could, in the manner of the Anabaptists, choose a name for yourself. To what extent would you then be that name? He read the names on the front doors he passed. But they were surnames, which made it even worse. De Jong, Zorgdrager, Rooseveld, Stuut, Lie. Live bodies lived here, bearing those names until they died. After that, their bodies would disintegrate, but the names that had belonged to them would continue to linger for some time in registers, surveys, and computers. And yet, somewhere in the eleven provinces, there must once upon a time have been a field in which roses had grown, and something of that once-existing field had been preserved in the white italic lettering on the door.
There was something disagreeable about these thoughts that did not fit in with the plans he had for today. Today was a happy day, he had decided, and nothing could budge him from his resolve. Besides, this first summer morning had thrown a girl into his lap who had driven the winter cold from his bones. He ought to be grateful. He decided to call her Dovey, and stepped inside a phone booth to tell Bernard that he would be a little late.
* *
About an hour later, as he was walking across the hot, noisy Rokin on his way to Bernard's shop, he had a pleasant feeling of anticipation. Bernard Roozenboom was the last of a line of renowned art dealers and had entrenched himself in his shop like a crab, as he put it. The window, in which usually only one object was displayed, an Italian Renaissance drawing or a small painting by a not too well known master of the Dutch school, seemed to aim more at putting visitors off than at attracting them.
"Your place looks so forbidding and closed, I'm sure you have raised the culture barrier by at least a metre," Inni had said to him once.
Bernard had shrugged. "Anyone who wants to see me can find me," he had replied. "All those upstarts, nouveau riche builders, heart specialists, and dentists" - a tone of intense scorn set in — "buy modern art. In galleries. To buy my stuff you need intelligence, and not just ordinary intelligence but judgment as well. And this is in short supply these days. There is a lot of lazy money around, and lazy money knows nothing about anything."
Inni had never met any customers there besides foreigners and one famous art historian, but that meant nothing. In a business like Bernard's, one customer could make up for six months, and in any case Bernard was rich. To get to him you had to go through three doors. On the first one, the street door, his name was painted in gold lettering — "English lettering," said Bernard. Having ventured through this door, you were standing in a minuscule hall, unexpectedly quiet, that led to a second door. By then, the Rokin was already far away. The moment you touched the gleamingly polished knob of the second door, graceful chimes would tinkle. You then arrived in the second hall ("Isn't that what you Catholics call limbo, or would it already be purgatory?"), and usually no one appeared. Through the net curtains forming the rear of the display window, some filtered daylight fell across the Persian carpet, which muffled every footstep, and on the two, at most three, paintings on the wall, which somehow conjured up thoughts of money rather than art ("My velvet mousetrap"). After a lapse of some time, a slow shadow would stir in the glow of the lamp behind the window — a glow that at this distance reached no higher than your knees ("I live in the underworld but I am not looking for anyone"). To get there you had to descend some steps ("Three steps, just like the Gold Coach, but the House of Orange does not buy art"). The room itself was small and dark. There were two desks, one for Bernard and one for a secretary, when there was one. For the rest, the furniture consisted of a heavy armchair, a threadbare two-seater Chesterfield, and a couple of bookcases full of leather-bound reference
books that Bernard did not need to consult because he knew everything already.
"Hello there," said Bernard. "I can't shake hands with you because I am being manicured. This is Mrs Theunissen. She has held sway over my nails ever since I was a baby."
"How do you do," said Inni.
The lady nodded. Under a fierce little operating lamp, Bernard's right hand lay like an anaesthetized patient in her left hand. Slowly, one by one, she filed his pink nails over a bowl of water. Until the day Inni first set eyes on Kees Verwey's portrait of Lodewijk van Deyssel, he had always thought that Bernard Roozenboom resembled le Baron de Charlus as he imagined him, although le baron would probably not have been pleased to look like what he called "an Israelite". Though what an Israelite was supposed to look like, no one could be sure of these days, ever since photographs of golden-haired female Israeli soldiers had appeared in the papers. The aristocratic cast of Bernard's nose stemmed from his own Renaissance drawings, his scant hair had that Nordic sandy colour that goes so well with tweeds, and his pale blue eyes had nothing of the glowing black cherries of the author of A la recherche du temps perdu, or, as Bernard preferred to say, "perda". Besides, no one except Proust and his readers had ever seen le baron, if it was possible at all to see someone made of words. However, if anyone was really training to be a cross-tempered old man, which was what Charlus and van Deyssel had been after all, each in his own way, it was Bernard. Scepticism, arrogance, aloofness, everything in his face conspired to make the biting aphorisms he employed against friend and foe all the more wounding; and this tendency of his was further strengthened by financial independence, a razor-sharp intelligence, vast erudition, and obstinate bachelorhood. His clothes, made to measure in London, concealed with some difficulty a heavy, somewhat rustic figure. His whole appearance (as he said himself) smacked defiantly of bygone times.
Rituals Page 9
