He also pointed out, almost opposite them, their old house on the Dijver, blackened and emblazoned behind the curtain of trees along the canal. It was tiny, casting a shortened shadow in front of it, thin and contorted like a piece of iron jewellery.
However, the details could still be made out. They counted the windows, suddenly looking at each other in agitation, their eyes burning, lips ready. They had just stopped, both together, at the casement of the unforgettable room. Through that permanent communion of lovers they had both thought the same thing at the same moment. Immediately all their memories rose up to them from below. The panes of the nuptial chamber sparkled, transparent, willing accomplices in the passionate evocation of their first night, their first kisses.
They fell into each others’ arms. It seemed to Godelieve that the town receded, grew even smaller, ceased to be, while they, together, entwined, rose higher, were no longer in the tower but merging under the caresses of the winds and the clouds, touching the sky…
But the time for the carillon had come. Joris sat down at the keys. Godelieve listened, disappointed at first. It was just a concert of shrill, strident voices that only sounded so sweet in the the town below because they were far away. It is distance that creates nostalgia. Up there the bells were singing out loud, fit to make themselves hoarse, a village choir, cantors giving the notes at random.
Yet Joris was doing his best, putting all his heart into his playing in honour of Godelieve. The basses came in with the old Flemish songs he played. Better than the sopranos of the little bells, which only took on angelic tones when heard from a distance, the big bells sang their noble dirges, with murmurs of organs and the forest, which moved Godelieve. She let herself be carried away by the vast hymn which Joris was creating for her, a stream of notes into which he seemed to pour his whole self.
The whole tower was singing of love.
The only ones who noticed this rejuvenated music, the renewed freshness of these flowers of sound floating down on the roofs and streets, were a few passers-by in the squares, a few townsfolk idling in their homes. What unexpected spring was blossoming up there? What was the matter with the old bells, what was making them sing faster, as if their black bronze was tinged with a feverish flush?
When Joris had finished he took Godelieve up the small staircase leading to the upper platform, a few more steps to climb … They were going higher … Then Godelieve saw the bells’ dormitories, all the bells aligned with their inscriptions, their dates, their coats of arms cast in the metal. And the differing patina of age: the tones of etchings, the strange oxidations, the rust like a chiaroscuro by Rembrandt. The metal was still vibrating, still quivering from having sung. One large bell above all attracted Godelieve. It was taller than she was and hanging from massive beams. It was embellished with relief ornamentation. Godelieve wanted to go over to it, but Joris brusquely drew her away.
‘No! Not over there!’
His voice was trembling with sudden emotion. It was the horrible bell, the Bell of Lust with all the ecstatic bodies and breasts picked like fruits, the vase full of sins, the ciborium held out by hell. Godelieve must not partake of that sacrament. Her eyes were too pure to contemplate that frozen orgy. And then the Bell of Lust was Barbara’s bell. The sensual pleasures of its bronze dress were the sensual pleasures of Barbara’s dress. It was the bell that had tempted him, had connived with Barbara and caused all their unhappiness. Godelieve must not go near it now.
He led her away, towards another bell, the one that sounded the hours, for he had heard the grinding of the rods that operated the clappers. A moment later the huge hammer rose, then came down on the sonorous metal. It was like a blow from a crozier striking the silence. The hour rang out, entire, episcopal.
Joris and Godelieve listened, suddenly serious. It was the passing of the hour, irrevocable, an hour they would never be able to forget, nor begin again, the most beautiful hour of their lives, the hour of the high point of their love, which had climbed to the top of the tower with them.
And when they found themselves hurrying down the stairs as they returned, already assailed by their fears for the future, they were well aware that they were coming back down from the summit of their love.
IX
Barbara returned after having been away for a month. Her health had hardly improved at all, nor her temper. The preparations for the journey home, the nervous exhaustion from travelling had, as usual, all upset her again. She was still irritable, bristly. Her face was pale. Joris recalled her too-red lips, now faded. A vision of a future black with threats and alarms opened up before him.
But Godelieve’s love compensated him for everything. She had had the same impression of her sister when she returned and told Joris.
‘What does it matter,’ he replied, ‘since I have you?’
Their happiness remained intact, nothing could darken it. They were still enraptured with each other, reflecting their love to one another as the sky and the waters do the moon. They bathed in its reciprocal light. Lovers have no idea it is so, but they exude brightness as they go. Sorrow is the rule, a dark livery worn by the mass of humanity. As soon as a couple are filled with joy they are so far outside the norm, they violate the rule so boldly, that they seem clothed in radiance, the radiance of a paradise from which they have come and to which they will return.
Thus is happiness visible .
It was impossible that Barbara should not notice the change that had taken place in Joris and Godelieve. If they were happy at the same time, it was that they were happy together. She had observed certain signs, a greater intimacy between them. Beforehand they had hardly ever used the familiar tu ; now Joris addressed Godelieve with it several times and corrected himself clumsily.
At the same time Barbara received anonymous letters, a despicable habit but very common in the provincial world, where malicious gossip, envy and spite grow rank, like the grass between the flagstones. She was welcomed home; she was mocked for being accommodating enough to leave her sister alone with her husband; the time and place of their evening walks was cited and they were described as romantic and suspicious; she was even informed that one day they had gone into the bell-tower together.
Nothing goes unobserved in that strict town where people lack occupation. Malicious curiosity there has even invented what is known as a busybody , that is a double mirror fixed to the outside of the windowledge so that the streets can be monitored even from inside the houses, all the comings and goings watched, a kind of trap to catch all the exits and entrances, the
encounters and gestures that do not realise they are being observed, the looks that prove everything.
Her suspicions thus aroused, Barbara was devastated, though also a little sceptical, despite the signs she had noticed herself. It was her self-esteem that was hurt. She had long since grown away from Joris, tired of him and of his kisses, but her pride rebelled, particularly at the idea of being betrayed and supplanted by her sister. She still refused to believe it and fell prey to indecision, accepting then rejecting it, finding it obvious then improbable. The two opposite poles. Swaying this way and that, like a boat to the opposite sides of a wave. And the worst was that there was no end to the vacillation.
Barbara was feeling her way, calculating the chances, examining the situation and analysing the two involved. Godelieve was all sweetness and light, true, but that manner often went with concealed subterfuges. Barbara felt a surge of bitterness and resentment towards her sister who, at the very least, had gone beyond the permitted bounds of familiarity, giving rise to her own suspicions and those that had prompted the anonymous letters.
Godelieve, all unsuspecting, was astonished at Barbara’s fits of irritation, which were now directed at her as much as at Joris.
Up to this point she had been spared and that was what had allowed her to intervene effectively, to make peace. Now she too was equally exposed to the changes of mood which swept through the house like a storm wind. But the two lovers were
hardly affected, letting them wash over them; their eyes were on other things, their minds in accord as soon as the scenes began. They quickly fell silent, never responded, mutely exchanging soft words, from soul to soul.
With Barbara constantly on the lookout, they were rarely alone, but it only needed a moment for their hands, their lips to meet, for them to embrace behind a door, on the landing. Stolen moments of happiness! They plucked a joy, like a fruit, from each other as they passed. And that was enough to light up a whole day.
Their immense happiness was condensed into a moment, just as a garden can be condensed into a bouquet. A sweet moment whose fragrance filled the solitude of their rooms. How intense is a love heightened by the frustration of waiting! Perhaps love, like happiness, is all the stronger for being intermittent.
Kept apart, Godelieve and Joris desired each other all the more.
Several times they arranged things so that they went out at the same time and met outside. Barbara followed her sister, but at too great a distance and quickly lost her in the maze of the twisting, tangled streets of Bruges.
Joris and Godelieve also suffered from not being able to talk to each other, even though living in the same house. Now Barbara insisted on staying with them, not going to bed until the same time as they did, hardly leaving them alone together at all.
And they felt they had so much to say to each other.
‘What if we wrote to each other?’ Godelieve suggested one day.
She had always felt the need to write, to pour herself out onto paper, to become conscious of her own self by seeing it on the reality of that whiteness. Even as a child, when she was a boarder at the convent school, she had written letters to Jesus, harbouring a passion for the Man-God, whose statue dominated the chapel with its handsome face, hair parted down the middle, delicate hands pointing to a Sacred Heart burning with love in his breast. She wrote to him in the evening, in the study room, and then, once a week when they were allowed out into the town, surreptitiously dropped her missive into a letterbox in a envelope addressed to ‘Monsieur Jésus’. She was convinced it would bring bring her good luck, help her to get what she was asking for and might even reach the addressee in heaven.
Now she passed on to Joris, ceaselessly, everything she could not say to him, everything which, from the very fact of living face to face with him, constantly rose up inside her and which she had to repress. In the evening she retired to her bedroom and wrote, sometimes late into the night. It was truly like being alone with him. She had won him back. She was talking to him on the paper.
All she was doing was replying to what he was whispering in the darkness behind her shoulder. The act of writing itself is like an act of love. There is contact. There is exchange too. We no longer know whether the words come out of the ink onto the page, or whether they emerge from the page itself where they were sleeping, the ink merely giving them colour.
For her, everything she wrote out in her interminable letters was merely what she read in her soul. But who had written all that on her soul? Was it Joris’s love? Or had he only made what had always been there visible?
The next day, after she had filled her long sheets, it took a great deal of cautious manoeuvring to be alone with Joris for a moment and give them to him. Joris replied. Godelieve wrote again, almost every day.
One evening Barbara, unable to sleep, got up and, walking round the house, noticed the light under Godelieve’s door, so late at night! She went in to discover her writing – and immediately flustered by her sister’s sudden appearance.
During the next few days Barbara remained baffled. You only wrote to someone who was absent. Godelieve couldn’t be writing to Joris since she saw him and spoke to him all the time. People who are not, or no longer, in love can scarcely understand the refinements, the subtle, delicate pleasures of true lovers. The delight of tying invisible threads between them, so that they always feel attached by some part of their soul. The joy of communion in the sacred species of paper, which is
transubstantiated, in which the beloved face shines through in a whiteness that resembles that of the host.
Barbara, hesitant, was doubly irritable in the face of her suspicions of a truth which by turns appeared, hid, crossed paths and finally reached a crossroads, clouding the future.
X
Since her sister’s return, Godelieve had started to feel less happy. And not only because her presence interrupted their intimate life together, their permanent rapture, the unconstrained enjoyment of their love. Before, thanks to the blessings of their state and the gift lovers have for deluding themselves, they were able to believe themselves alone in the universe, forget reality and create a world in accordance with their dream. Now reality asserted itself once more. As if it were a crime, they had to hide the love they would have liked to pour forth, into the sea and into the air. The poor human heart is a bowl so shallow it overflows at the least happiness.
For a long time they excused themselves in their own eyes by blaming a destiny which had gone astray but which had since returned to the true path of their lives. This caused Godelieve no misgivings because Barbara had previously stolen Joris’s love from her. She was the one who had been his first and eternal betrothed. Because of Barbara they, who were married in the eyes of God, had long been lost to each other. How could it be wrong for them to find each other again, to correct the error of a malicious Fate?
For a long time Godelieve had deluded herself with specious arguments, a casuistry of the heart, very personal and over-subtle. However, since Barbara’s return she felt slightly guilty.
How could she believe her love lawful if she did not dare reveal it to anyone? There was no point in being misled by words. Words summon up other words and they destroy each other. Yes, she was the first to love Joris. It was their will that had betrothed them, before Fate intervened; Fate alone had kept them apart. To say that would be to tell the truth, but one could also say that now she was the one who was bringing adultery to the conjugal home. And the adultery was aggravated by a hint of incest, since it was her sister’s husband she loved, almost her brother…
How wretched a life, a heart can be! Soon Godelieve was suffering from what she saw, after all, as duplicity, a betrayal of trust, a forbidden love that dare not speak its name. She, usually so frank and open, was ashamed of the constant dissimulation. How could a love as noble as theirs, a love which had climbed as high as the tower, be happy to go in the shadow that made it look as if it did not exist?
In her evening letters she told Joris of her distress at the life she was forced to lead: lies, stratagems, deception with a smile,
glib gestures, honeyed words. And having to watch herself all the time! What a disaster it would be, what an eruption of rage, if Barbara, with her dreadful, violent temper, should discover their secret. Their love, it seemed, was on a volcano; their love seemed to be waiting for the storm.
Godelieve wrote all this to Joris; she told him it in those brief exchanges they sometimes had when Barbara was dressing or occupied with some household task, leaving them alone for a moment.
‘Let’s go away together?’ Joris said.
‘Why?’ Godelieve replied with a sad look. ‘We can never get married.’
Being Catholic, she knew well that the Church would not agree to bless a second union. And with her pious, mystical nature, how could she live in that state? The present situation was different. God himself had blessed her marriage with Joris in the church where they had exchanged rings. In the eyes of God she had truly become his wife . They were not causing a public scandal.
It was between God and them. And that was how it must stay. Their love must not be made public; it could never be acknowledged.
Even if Joris were to obtain a divorce, the civil authorities would hesitate, would demand a dispensation because of the close relationship, the semi-incest. Society would be shocked, that was sure. They would have to leave, go far away into exile, and that would mean they would still feel the
y were in hiding, were denying themselves.
Godelieve was unhappy.
It was above all because of the town that she felt it would be dangerous, insane even, to think of leaving with Joris; away from it he would suffer so much. This was the natural setting for his life, for his dreams. He could not live away from Bruges.
Godelieve certainly felt she was loved. But she also felt there was something that was loved more deeply. Joris’s love for the town was far above his love for a woman. The two loves were as different as a house and a tower.
Godelieve realised that Joris, hardly had they left, would fall prey to incurable nostalgia. His longing for the town would follow him. All his ways would be darkened by the shadow of the ancient bell-towers. Bruges was his work, a work of art that would bring him fame and that he had to complete. To tear him away from it was an impossible hope.
But is it not events that are masters of our words and our decisions? Godelieve vacillated, discussing with herself and with Joris where their love might end. During those days there was a sudden, chilling alert which almost changed everything, brought it to a head. It was the perpetual fear, perhaps also the
punishment, of illicit passions – the fear that the sin might be made flesh. Godelieve was terrified. Joris too, but he was regretful in equal measure. It was an irony of Fate, an extra, unnecessary cruelty. He had so much wanted to have children, in the early days of his marriage to Barbara, when he took her to the Museum to see the portrait of her patron saint by Memling and showed her the donors, kneeling among their numerous offspring shown as different-sized heads, squeezed together like votive offerings. Above all he had dreamt of having sons who would keep his name alive in Flanders, continuing the ancient family tree.
But his home remained empty, barren of future. Now he visualised a situation where, if he had married Godelieve instead of Barbara, his happiness would have been complete with not only a love that was all sweetness, but the joy of progeny and the pride of his name living on.
The Bells of Bruges Page 16
