The Bells of Bruges

by Georges Rodenbach

  Everything was in harmony. It was as if the carillon were coming from beyond the world, while the town already seemed to have entered eternity.

  XVI

  Barbara was superstitious. With her Spanish complexion, that flesh with the bleeding gash of her too-red lips, her face reflected her soul. She burnt inwardly with a faith, a dark, violent religion, also Spanish, full of agonies, of wounds, of candles, of the fear of death. Her existence was tormented by a hundred superstitious fears, like the fibres of a hair-shirt. She spent every Friday and the thirteenth day of every month in suspense, expecting some calamity. A broken mirror presaged a death. And it was true that several times her premonitions and dreams had been confirmed. Perhaps she was forewarned of what was to come because of her strange neurosis, her nerves in communication with the invisible, tying their threads to coming bereavements, to bells about to ring out, to hearts which shared an ascendant sign and even to the heart of God. Mental telepathy going from soul to soul, as astral telepathy goes from star to star.

  Recently she had gone for a walk with her father who, despite his sedentary existence, had suddenly, on a whim, decided he would like to go out with her, in a fit of tenderness, overcome with affection, as if at the last minute he had felt remorse, regretting the long coolness between his daughter and himself.

  They had spent a long time strolling around aimlessly, taking it slowly, the rhythm of their gait governed, as it were, by the cadence of the bells which that afternoon were ringing without respite from the top of the scattered bell-towers. Parish bells tolling for the funeral masses of the morrow. On the door of Saint Saviour’s, and also on the ancient walls of the Church of Our Lady, Barbara saw more of the large funeral notices than she had ever seen, the customary public announcements of the service, like posters for a play. The name of the deceased leaps out from them, with star billing. They had also encountered a coffin carried by a joiner’s labourers which was being taken, uncovered and empty, to some bereaved household. Truly, death was in the air, was all round them.

  A more conclusive portent was needed. All of a sudden, as they came round the back of the Hospital of Saint John, they saw a gathering on the little bridge. Men were shouting, women throwing up their arms, pale with horror. They were told that a body, flaccid and distended, had just been seen floating in the leaden waters of the canal. At that point they deepen, renouncing all reflection, appearing to go down forever. Had the drowned man returned from that abyss of silence? Had he seen the bottom of the canal?

  Death here seems aggravated. It is an end worse than death. Does a person have to have reached the infinite of despair to throw himself into those waters?

  Barbara dragged her father away so that they would not have to witness the horrible spectacle of the drowned man being pulled out of the canal. They hurried off, silent now and haunted by funereal images. There was no doubt that the old antiquary was thinking of death, of his death. That was what Barbara thought, but she did not have the strength to distract him, to find words to counter what was already inevitable.

  One night not long afterwards she awoke with a start. The front-door bell had rung in an accumulation of feverish strokes.

  Immediately Barbara thought, ‘It is bad news ringing.’ And indeed, someone had been sent to tell hem that van Hulle was in a critical state. In bed and almost asleep, he had had an attack, announced by a great cry that went right through the house. Now he was lying there, inert.

  What it was they did not know. The doctors had not yet arrived.

  Words gabbled in haste by a servant; the household roused, great confusion, anxiety, sobbing; then the race across the sleeping town, on a warm summer’s night which seemed completely incompatible with the possibility of death.

  When Barbara arrived with Joris, van Hulle did not recognise them. His eyes were shut; his head was flung back among the pillows, crushing them as if it were weighed down by all the blood that had rushed to his brain. His skin was marked with little purple lines, those veins of blood that October brings to the vine leaves. Rasping breath, the noise scraping away at the silence. Godelieve was standing beside the bed, bent over the patient, paler than the sheets, appearing to offer him her own ample breath and ready to give him her whole life. Doctors arrived; in the panic several had been called. They observed, palpated, suggested vague palliatives, declared that it was too early to form an opinion, that they would return in the morning, then withdrew, gravely indifferent.

  A long night, an interminable night, a gloomy vigil, which became even gloomier when day broke – the lamp in distress as it struggled against the clear light of dawn.

  It was evident what had happened. Van Hulle had suffered a stroke, which, moreover, had been presaged by certain warning signs – flushes, drowsiness.

  When the doctors returned, his condition was declared serious, his chances of recovery minimal.

  Godelieve was still at his bedside, administering the remedies, fighting, hoping against hope. She found strength in her love for

  her father, that tender love which he had returned with such attentions and caresses, a unique affection, the sweetness of which was theirs alone, the delight of exchanges every minute of the day. Even now she was appealing to him, with his name, her name, all the little terms of endearment with no real meaning that they used for each other, the names of animals or flowers, monosyllables, adjectives, abbreviations, baby talk, the conventional signs, the private vocabulary of those who love each other, as if to show that they are a different person for each other than for the rest of the world.

  At the same time she was kissing him, his face, his hands, covering him with kisses, imagining she could flush out the illness and that it would disappear when she had placed her lips everywhere.

  Barbara, on the other hand, was pacing round and round the room, filled with anguish, on edge, breaking out into fits of sobbing, at other times flinging herself into a chair, completely drained, her gaze apparently fixed on the distance, beyond the world.

  As for Joris, he was kept busy all the time. During the night he had had to go to call the doctors, then rouse a chemist, get him to mix the potions. In the morning he had to go and see the priest, to ask him to bring van Hulle the extreme unction and the viaticum.

  It was a sorrowful moment for the old house when the priest entered in alb and stole, bearing the host in the pyx, preceded by an altar boy who was ringing a small bell. The servants had come into their master’s bedroom as well. Old Pharaïlde, who had been in service with him for more than twenty years, was crying, large tears rolling down, scattering pearls of water among the beads of her rosary. Everyone knelt. Godelieve had placed a small altar on a chest of drawers, a white station with, as an altar cloth, the still unfinished lace veil she had been making for the statue of the Madonna in their street, never imagining, as she intertwined the threads each day, that she was weaving her father’s death-veil. The ciborium was placed on it. The prayers began, private murmurings, flights that scarcely took wing, Latin phrases skimming the surface of the the silence. When the priest anointed his forehead and temples with the holy chrism, vague spasms crossed the face of the dying man. A last trace of sensitivity? Barbara was very close, her nerves stretched to breaking point, and every possible alternative was reflected in her face, the face of a temperament as responsive as a mirror and which lived on reflections.

  But now the priest had taken the ciborium from the chest of drawers. He went over to the bed, holding the host in his fingers. They all bowed. The altar boy’s little bell rang out once more with its high-pitched yet sweet sound. A delicate peal, an acoustic aspergillum sprinkling the prayer-filled room with little drops of sound.

  Van Hulle’s mouth had been held open to allow the host to be inserted. It seemed to those who were nearest that it emitted a faint murmur before closing. Barbara seemed frightened, then suddenly hopeful. She claimed that her father had tried to speak, that she had distinctly heard what he said, even though it was faint and half muffl
ed. He had said, ‘They have chimed.’

  Unconscious babblings, confused images of delirium! Perhaps, too, from the depths where he was stuck he had sensed, through successive waves in the water, what was happening on the surface of life. That would explain the words vouched for by Barbara. Of the ceremony of extreme unction he had doubtless only registered the sound of the altar boy’s little bell; some of his faculty of hearing must have survived and transmitted the sensation to the brain, thanks to one last clear nerve. ‘They have chimed.’ He may have heard the tinkling, an instinctive vibration of the eardrum, the ultimate echo of life. On the edge of death, he heard the bell ring and, given his obsession, taken it for the chime of a clock.

  But then why the plural? Presumably Barbara, her nerves on edge and her gaze fixed on death, had imagined words which had come from within her.

  The whole day his death rattle sounded through the quiet house.

  And because of the great religious silence, the church silence that illness creates around itself, the confused grating of the tick-tock from the museum of clocks could be heard. The pendulums swung to and fro; the wheels seemed to be grinding out time; it was a continuous noise, slightly hoarse, articulating the flow.

  Godelieve felt moved when she heard them. Her father had loved them so much. Along with her they had been his most constant, his dearest friends. What was going to become of them without him?

  Barbara, on the other hand, found them irritating; the noise racked her nerves. She asked Joris to silence them, to stop the large pendulums, which were pulling her heart to and fro, the wheels that were constantly tearing at something inside her.

  The house was completely hushed. It was as if it had died already, before its master.

  Towards evening his condition worsened. His rasping breaths became deeper, more spaced out. The little purple veins broadened, the whole of his face was flushed; the sweat continuously welling up in huge drops formed a kind of crown of tears round his forehead. His body kept being shaken with violent shudders. The old man, still robust, was fighting against death.

  He had stretched out his legs, bracing them against the foot of the bed, the better to resist.

  All at once the battle seemed over.

  There was a respite, an improvement. The little veins faded, serenity flooded his face, the beginnings of a smile, a sort of

  otherworldly light, as if his brow had been touched by the light of some unknown morning. In amazement, those around saw the sick man stir, come back to life, so to speak.

  An expression of bliss, of immense joy on his face, they heard him repeat, distinctly this time, ‘They have chimed … They have chimed!’

  Then, raising himself up a little, he leant on his outstretched arms, like a swan leaning on its wings as it tries to rise from the water when it is dying; and the old man expired –as if taking flight – in a blaze of white.

  One moment later Barbara fell to the ground, rigid and ashen-faced. Joris had to carry her to a bed where she lay prostrate for a long time. When he returned to van Hulle’s room he looked on his old friend, that noble heart, the first apostle of the Flemish Movement. He lay there, looking like one of the elect …

  Already so little of the human about him. He was his own marble effigy; a bust copying what he had been, but with the transfiguration of art, the beauty of a purer material. Godelieve had quickly laid out the body, doing as little as possible so as not to disturb him, not to harm him. She was on her knees praying, bathed in silent tears, at the foot of the bed.

  When she saw Joris, she said, ‘Barbara was right. You heard his last words? He repeated them: “They have chimed.”’

  ‘Yes. He’ll have been thinking of his clocks. It was his lifelong dream. He must have thought that at last they had all struck together.’

  Godelieve went back to her prayer and her tears, suddenly seized with remorse at having spoken in the presence of her dead father, even if it was to talk about him.

  At six o’clock on that summer’s afternoon the heat in the room was oppressive, a room rendered fusty by the smell of death and of potions. It needed fresh air. Joris opened the window giving onto the garden and those of the neighbouring houses: open spaces with grey courtyards, green lawns and trees. Borluut looked without seeing, melancholy from the contemplation of death, which had been an example to him, a lesson promulgated from the threshold of infinity, so to speak.

  ‘They have chimed!’ Borluut had understood straight away. Dying, the old man had attained his dream. His hopes, his wishes had not been in vain. It was by desiring things that one came to deserve them. Human striving was not vain. It was the striving alone that counted, since it came true when it reached its conclusion. It was sufficient unto itself, it was its own consummation.

  The old antiquary had so fervently desired that his clocks would, one day, sound in unison. And he did hear them strike, all

  together, the same hour, the hour of his death. In death everyone’s dream is fulfilled. In the world beyond we achieve the thing we coveted during life. Thus we are finally ourselves, made whole.

  Borluut plunged into an abyss of reverie, thinking of his own case. Up to now he, too, had been living in a dream, devoted to the beauty of Bruges, with that one love and that one ideal, which had already consoled him for the daily disappointments of an unhappy marriage. He must hold on to his dream with an immense and exclusive desire. For the dream, he thought, was not just a dream but anticipated reality , since it would be fulfilled at the moment of death.

  Meanwhile the man who had joined the elect was resting in peace, no noise coming in through the open window. All that could be heard in the silent room were the few flies flitting to and fro, black snowflakes, music of two wings. And it was solemn, the hum of these little flies that had been sent, it seemed, with the sole purpose of rendering the silence perceptible, the silence of which we are only aware, which we can only measure, against the sound and which appears vaster the fainter the sound. Thus the silence seemed more silent, the dead man more dead. The ephemeral insects made eternity comprehensible.

  For a long time Borluut listened unconsciously to the buzzing of the flies, one of which, now and then, ventured onto the bed, even onto the face of the dead man, no longer afraid of him.

  PART TWO

  LOVE

  I

  After van Hulle’s death, Godelieve had gone to live with her sister, in Joris’s house. She had been afraid of staying by herself because of her dead father, because of her memories of her dead father.

  ‘What are you afraid of?’ she was asked.

  ‘Of everything and nothing. You always think the dead aren’t entirely dead and that they’re going to come back.’

  Godelieve was startled by her own shadow, the sound of her own footsteps, the least unfamiliar noise. Her reflection rising up in a mirror would come towards her like a ghost. It was above all in the evenings that she was afraid, becoming a child again, looking under her bed, shaking the silent folds of the curtains.

  She felt she was going to come across a corpse at any moment.

  The terrors that follow a death! And worries about the dead man himself, concerns that his eyes had not been properly closed. And

  the faint implacable odour which persists in the rooms, musty and obstinate: the sweat of the death-throes or burnt wax.

  Godelieve had had to leave the old house in Zwarte-Leertouwersstraat. She thought it would be just for a short while, long enough for her memories, the images and the funereal stench to dissipate. Now months had passed and the temporary arrangement seemed to have become permanent.

  These scenes of death had made a vivid impression on Joris as well. That always happens when we are present and the person concerned is someone close. We always relate them to ourselves.

  We see ourselves lying there, when our time comes, pale with the ultimate pallor. Suddenly, in the middle of our daily routine, our ambitions, our sorrows, our affairs, we are confronted with a vision of the only reali
ty. What we are is brought face to face with what we shall be. To tell the truth, Joris often thought of death. Sometimes, when he was looking into a mirror, he would almost close his eyes and see himself, because of the distance and the paleness the mirror gives, with the simplified face drained of blood he would have when he was dead.

  He had, however, been even more deeply moved by van Hulle’s death. For him it had been a kind of example, a solemn lesson from the edge of the tomb. During the weeks that followed he recalled the old antiquary’s final visions, which must have sweetened his death throes, and the ecstatic smile on his face.

  For a long time he continued to hear his cry at the moment of death: ‘They have chimed!’ He had realised his dream through having desired it. We must make ourselves worthy of fulfilment…

  Joris remained pensive, taking stock of himself, of his life.

  He, too, had been living in a dream. If we earn the right to our dream by renouncing the world, then he could earn it when his time came. For he had certainly renounced the world as far as he himself was concerned. He had devoted himself to the town, expressing himself entirely in it and through it. Doubtless he, like van Hulle, would be granted a vision of his ideal at the moment of death.

  But that moment is brief. And in his case the realisation of the dream would be so anonymous! Others, the artists, the creators, must see themselves in that instant as immortal, crowned with a laurel wreath which will cool the burning sweat on their brow.

  Because of the impersonal nature of his work he, a little like van Hulle, would only be able to exclaim as he died, ‘The town is beautiful … The town is beautiful!’ without enjoying a sense of personal pride, without conquering death through the knowledge that his name was already on its way to the centuries to come. It was for that hollow conclusion that he had renounced the world.