The Bells of Bruges

by Georges Rodenbach

  Not long after that Barbara, furious, went out, slamming the door, leaving the room in a swirl of skirts like the wake of a tempest.

  Twilight had deepened. Joris and Godelieve were bruised and in receptive mood. They sat there facing one another, not saying anything, scarcely able to see each other. For each the other was a comforting apparition, a silent shadow which seemed no more than a memory of itself, that which persists in mirrors or in the mind. After Barbara’s vehement outburst they both savoured the sweetness of the silence, a silence which seemed convalescent, begging to be spared violence. They sensed that nothing needed to be said. In silence, minds understand each other.

  Joris had detected an irrevocable decision, mysterious reasons which it was better to leave untouched and against which words were powerless. Since Barbara wished it, he ventured to advise Godelieve, to plead the case of his friend who had been rejected, but very discreetly, for no more than a moment.

  ‘It might perhaps be best if you did marry –’

  But Godelieve stopped him with an imploring gesture, a look of distress. ‘Oh, don’t say that. You … you of all people!’

  It was a cry that revealed everything, like a flash of lightning exposing the bottom of a valley. Joris saw the depths of her soul. He became aware of something he had merely suspected, had almost forgotten since the time when van Hulle had thoughtlessly revealed Godelieve’s feelings.

  He had assumed it was one of those vague passions such as all young girls have, a stirring of the heart that settles on an object at random, a spreading of the wings on the edge of the nest.

  Now he sensed that what she had felt for him might perhaps have been true love. Was that love the reason why she remained disillusioned, refusing any further attempt at happiness? Was she one of those women who, after a single trial, cast the key to their heart into eternity?

  Joris continued to look at her without saying anything, without seeing her any more, lost in reverie, conjuring up the melancholy charm of things that have not come to fruition, projects that

  have been abandoned, journeys that were never undertaken, everything that could be and will never have been.

  XIV

  Borluut’s home life was becoming drearier and drearier. The mysterious state of Barbara’s nerves was getting worse. Now her fits of anger were more frequent and lasted longer. Again and again the slightest thing – some domestic annoyance, being contradicted, a breakage, a minor misunderstanding – would send her instantly into a rage, a storm that swept through the house, leaving behind it nothing but dead leaves. But now, to make matters worse, these crises persisted, leaving her drained, prey to sombre thoughts, ashen faced, with the tears running down like rain on a tomb. Joris was moved and, even though still smarting, cut to the heart by the scene she had made, offered soft words, the balm of friendship and reconciliation. Tentatively he placed a soothing hand on hers, sketched a caress on her cheek, trying to exert a calming influence. Barbara pushed him away harshly and her lips, shut as tight as a clasp, suddenly opened in an explosion, another rockfall of violent words. Joris did not know what to do, how to reply, to mitigate these scenes which left him bruised to the very soul. Trying to avoid them was pointless, they occurred of their own accord. It was as if Barbara’s moods had their seasons, the equinox returning regularly. The plan he made in advance to remain silent, to give way immediately, was vain as well. Despite it, he was still at a loss every time, incapable of deciphering the scrawl of nerves.

  Initially he had simply put it down to her character, assuming she was by nature irascible and capricious. Now he was forced to the conclusion that there was something beyond her control in her fits of temper. ‘Obviously she’s ill,’ he told himself.

  And he thought of all the strange neuroses which, from time immemorial, have debased humanity, a tangled skein strangling the will, the soul entirely. A scourge that had worsened during this century as a consequence of the decline of the races and the accumulation of heredity. In Barbara’s case he recalled the premature death of her mother, also the victim of an obscure malady.

  ‘No matter,’ said Borluut, ‘whether she’s ill or simply ill-natured, I suffer for it all the same. And I suffer from being in doubt . Where does illness stop and ill-nature start? Up to what point is it conscious or unconscious? Even if the anger wells up of its own accord, a person still chooses the words. Thus hatred hesitates, alternating with pity. Be that as it may,’ Borluut concluded, ‘she has still drained the sap from my life.’

  In such moments he felt sorry for himself, bewailing the dead end in which his destiny was locked, not even sweetened by sorrow.

  Other families are saddened by illness, but there are illnesses in which the suffering only serves to increase love. A woman grows palely delicate, more spirit than flesh. It has a sweet sorrow, like the evening before a departure. The curtains round the bed quiver like a veil…

  A state of ill-health such as Barbara’s – assuming she was not simply ill-natured – was tense, hostile, discouraging tender care, rejecting soothing potions, tainting the flowers that were brought to keep the patient company. Such illnesses are exasperating, with the result that people soon distance themselves.

  After being torn this way and that, between painful alternatives, between violence and renewed tenderness, Joris felt that his love was over. He had finally retrieved his heart, it was no longer at the mercy of these tides, of the ebb and flow which toyed with his happiness. Now he felt he had won back his freedom, was master of himself once more, unaffected by the daily ups and downs, alone in the farthest recesses of his soul where every one of us can reach and possess his own self. One sorrow remained: not to have at least the compensation of children and that his home was as silent as his heart. That, too, was doubtless the consequence of Barbara’s condition. Yet in the past he had so often dreamt of having a numerous family. He remembered how, during their engagement, he had taken Barbara to the Museum to see Memling’s great triptych with St Barbara, her patron saint, and been moved at the sight of the donors surrounded by their five sons and eleven daughters, a patriarchal family, their faces juxtaposed and resembling each other. He had imagined himself having a family like that painted by Memling of Willem Moreel, the burgomaster of Bruges.

  Now the dream had ended in a wife without love and a house without children.

  What is more, Borluut had very little social life. He was not of a very sociable disposition, finding banal conversations and ordinary company tedious. His old house on the Dijver, with its blackened façade, its high windows in their wooden frames with small panes of greenish glass, the colour of the canal facing it, was somnolent, closed, the blinds drawn, like a house whose owners were away. The bell hardly ever rang, at most a delivery or a client. Barbara had no friends at all. The bell would make a short, sharp sound, as if to emphasise the vast and immutable tranquility, before the corridor immediately became a path of silence once more.

  Borluut did not even go to the Monday evening soirées at van Hulle’s any longer. They were his last diversion and he missed them. They had stopped of their own accord, so to speak, each of the guests attending less frequently, then giving up.

  Bartholomeus had adopted a cloistered existence in order to concentrate on the painting for the Town Hall he had started,

  becoming more and more like the Beguines among whom he worked. As for Farazyn, he found it difficult, after his venture of the heart with Godelieve, to spend a whole evening each week in her presence. He was, moreover, annoyed at her rejection of him and even broke with Borluut, claiming he and his wife had, if anything, dissuaded the young girl. The whole affair had been distorted by indiscretions, gossip and spiteful comments.

  Borluut felt he was alone.

  Separated from everyone as he was, he rediscovered his love of the town, indomitable and more fervent than ever. At bottom he had never lived other than for that dream and in that dream. To adorn the town, to make it the most beautiful of towns. Even when he climbed
the bell-tower, exhausting himself at the heavy mechanism of the carillon, it was to embellish the town, to crown it with the wreath of iron flowers. All his restorations and reconstructions were directed towards the same end, to give each street its surprise, its escutcheon of stone, its façade ornamented like a chasuble, its carvings sinuous as a vine. He was the one who had saved all these treasures of the past from death, had exhumed them from the plaster, the mortar, the whitewash, the bricks – from the vile winding sheet of ignorance.

  It was as if he had brought them to life, had created them a second time.

  A great effort! A visionary genius! The people of the region started to become aware of it. By a painful irony of life, his professional situation brightened the more his home life clouded over. Work and commissions poured in. He found and renewed hundreds of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century houses. What is more, he had just completed his reconstruction of the Gruuthuse Palace, which he considered his masterpiece. When the old town house was handed over to him it was in a wretched state. A noble edifice fallen into sad decay. The façade still bore the arms of Jan van der Aa, lord of that place, who had adopted them in 1340.

  The king of England had stayed there at the time of the Wars of the Roses. Now the ancient palace had reached its nadir. It was used as a pawn shop. The cast-off garments of the poor within these walls which themselves looked like the cast-off garments of the centuries. Poverty within poverty, like tears in the rain.

  Borluut had looked at the palace as one might look at a beggar.

  How could one make the beggar suddenly abandon his rags and appear dressed in sumptuous fabrics and rare jewels, in all the splendour of a prince returning to his town? How could it be cleansed of the grime of ages?

  Borluut performed the miracle. He galvanised the ruins.

  He gave blind windows back their sight, cured the crippled gables, made the hunched turrets stand up straight. He revived the bas-reliefs eaten away by rain and time, fleeing faces, recollections lost in the depths of memory which suddenly emerge and come into focus. Everywhere there was renewal: the open-work

  balustrade stretched out unbroken, the stone garlands blossomed, the ogival arches drew their new bows.

  Borluut’s restoration was complete. What was going to become of the former palace now it had been rebuilt? But do things not call out to each other? There are mysterious analogies, there is a rhythm driving the universe. Destinies come together. When the house is built, the occupant it deserves comes, the one that was meant to come. Thus when the Gruuthuse Palace became a beggar, sitting on the side of a canal in Bruges, weary from its long journey through history, it only housed the poor, those who resembled it. They had turned it into a pawnshop.

  However, as soon as the Palace, as if touched by a magic wand, once more became itself, its destiny changed. At that time an old dowager died and bequeathed to the town a marvellous collection of Bruges lace, to be preserved and exhibited there. Now that the Palace was a piece of lace in stone, it simply had to become a museum of lace. Mysterious attraction! Everything fits. What happens to us is what we deserve. Things turn out according to what we have made of our soul.

  These frail marvels, embroidered with needles, embroidered on bobbins, were set out in the rooms. There are some which must have taken a whole life, for example the hunt, in which we can see the huntsman, his dog and the partridges; or this passion, signed in 1529 by the sister of the bishop of Bruges who included in it Saint Veronica’s veil, St Peter’s cock, the sun and the moon. And there are unique pieces: the altar cloth from the first communion of Charles the Fifth, given by him to the church at Oudenaarde and transferred here, with his coat of arms in one corner, the crown of the Holy Roman Empire placed on the Paschal Lamb, which seems overwhelmed by it, crushed beneath the burden, inexorable even for One who is divine.

  Everywhere this exquisite lace is spread out before us, in wide strips or symmetrical rectangles. Infinite flights of fancy: flowers, palms, a tangle of lines as mysterious as the lines of one’s hand. Is it not like a stained-glass window in linen? Is it not like a geography of threads: brooklets, pools, an accumulation of frozen water, a calm flow, in one place dried up, ending in a void, in another spreading out in meanders, in little waves coming together and parting.

  These intermediary strips linking the rosettes, the scattered motifs, are characteristic of Bruges lace. Other styles are like filigree. Bruges lace is like a more solid piece of silverware, though still very delicate. A white garden! Daisies and ferns of frost on a windowpane that will vanish if you breathe on them.

  There were some pieces in the valuable collection going back to 1200. Was it not logical that they should end up there? Could such a delightful idea as collecting lace arise anywhere other than in Bruges, Bruges of the Beguines, those perpetual

  lacemakers, Bruges with its monuments of stone guipure, where it was realised with a name as sweet as if it came from the lips of angels and which sums up the whole town: ‘Museum of Lace’.

  When the restored Palace was opened it was greeted with wonderment which increased Borluut’s reputation.

  He was rewarded with public recognition, banquets were given in his honour, serenades.

  At the same time another honour was accorded him which touched him more deeply. The ancient guild of the Archers of Saint Sebastian unanimously elected him its head. It was the oldest society in the town; since 1425 it had received an annual payment of a hundred Paris livres from the council. It had, moreover, taken part in the crusades. That was why, during the processions and pageants in which it takes part even today, its ancient banner is surrounded by a retinue of little negroes, Turks and men on horseback wearing turbans. The company still occupied the same premises, the old palace with the turret, as graceful as a slender maiden, at the end of Carmersstraat, where it settled during the sixteenth century. Everything was preserved there intact: the book of funerary bequests which each new member signed, allocating sums for his funeral mass and other minor expenses after his death; the jewels given by the Duke of Gloucester and the sovereigns who belonged to it, that is presentation cups, a bird and a sceptre in chased silver, the insignia of the King of the Shoot and of the Guildmaster. In the hall of honour were the portraits of all those who had been one or the other, holding in their hands painted representations of the centuries-old pieces of silver which were still displayed in their cases. These portraits immortalise the greatest names in the history of Flanders, since the Guildmaster was chosen from among those outstanding either by birth or services. Jan Breydel, the butcher of Bruges who led the uprising against Philip IV, was Master of the Guild of Archers of Saint Sebastian, as was Jan Adornes, a crusader and donor of the church in Jerusalem, which contains his image in stone over the tomb where he lies. Because of the great memories associated with it, this is one of the most coveted honorary positions in the town. It was offered spontaneously to Borluut. His name alone qualified him, since he belonged to the ancient nobility of Flanders (one of his ancestors was the hero of the Battle of Gavere), but it was above all his glorious achievement in the resurrection of the Gruuthuse that brought him the votes. Once elected, he was invested according to the rites; as was de rigueur , the inaugural banquet included the traditional dish of cockscombs, an allusion to archery and to the feathered targets that are shot off the pole.

  Borluut was happy. In this way he relived the past, was for a moment part of the age of glory. He had rebuilt the setting, now he had come upon its spirit. The ancient soul of Flanders lived on in the guild, in the faded folds of its banner, on the lips of the old portraits, which would give him their silent support,

  thus becoming the champions of the Movement. Borluut experienced the joy of a dream come true. He had been right to love the town, to recreate its past, to want it to live in beauty, to make it into a work of art, his work of art. His love of the town, at least, had not deceived him, in his moment of triumph he felt it was reciprocated.

  What, then, were his triflin
g personal troubles, his gloomy house, his irascible wife, the occasional cries and quarrels, the daily ashes of his hearth? High above the world! He climbed up into his dream as he climbed the tower. His dream too was a tower from the top of which he could look down on the town, loving it more and more as he watched it in its sleep. It was so beautiful.

  XV

  One winter’s day Borluut was granted his absolute ideal, a peak of harmony in which the town finally became a work of art, with the colours of an old painting in a museum. Snow and gold! The flakes had accumulated during the night. Now, as he climbed the bell-tower, the sun emerged, adding its sheen to the whiteness.

  The town seemed transfigured, and so pure! The very swans on the canal banks were humbled. An unearthly whiteness, diaphanous, such as only lilies have.

  Everything was white. Borluut had always been susceptible to the charm – the intoxication, the sensual pleasure, so to speak – of whiteness. Even as a child his fingers had trembled at the touch of linen. The fresh altar cloths on Sunday, the sheets drying in the bleaching fields around the town, the priests’ surplices during the Procession of the Holy Blood sent a shiver to his eyes, like the caress of something with a hint of the divine.

  That morning Bruges had laid itself open to him in a unanimity of whiteness. The old roofs, usually gardens of red, had become sloping white flowerbeds. The frost had put screens of lace over the windows. The bell-towers were officiating in ermine copes.

  Mass for a dead virgin. Deuil blanc , wreaths made of hoarfrost pearls and the soft pall of snow! The town seemed to have shrunk, you would have thought it was bigger. The cause was its robe of white muslin. Bruges had died dressed like that. Can there be anything more sad than a girl dying on the day of her first communion, in her new dress. A little bride of death … That was Bruges.

  Borluut surveyed it, stiff and immaculate. When the time came to awaken the carillon, he trembled, hardly daring to touch the keys. What hymn was chaste enough, what Beguine anthem fluid enough to modulate such a sweet death? Tentatively he hazarded muted phrases, soft arpeggios, themes merely sketched out, chords falling like autumn leaves, spotless feathers drifting down, shovelfuls of snow, as it were, poured onto a coffin that had already been lowered into the snow.