Godelieve viewed the possibility like death. In the first place she would not survive until the end – the torment, the shame, the anguish would kill her. She recalled the ominous portent, the warning she should have seen in the gravestone where she and Joris had met, that evening in Saint Saviour’s, the evening when she had become his wife . They had not noticed that their chairs were standing on effigies of the dead, that their feet were continuing the effacement of the names already worn down by the tread of centuries. It was only when Godelieve’s gloves had fallen to the floor and they bent down to pick them up that their hands, bearing the new rings, their blind hands eager to rush into their misfortune, had truly touched death.
Now the portent was being fulfilled. Godelieve was still unsure; perhaps she was simply ill, had made a mistake and her sin was not bearing fruit inside her. She hoped, repented, prayed, went to bury herself for hours in churches, trusting in heaven alone to put an end to her torment. It was still possible she was mistaken. But every time she raised her eyes to the altars, a Virgin appeared to her bearing a child in her arms. It became an obsession, an inescapable allegory in which she saw herself soon carrying the fruit of her sin. Eventually she attached a superstition to these Madonnas. She told herself, ‘If the first one I see when I go out today has her hands together, it will mean the oracle has replied in my favour and all my fears are groundless. If, on the other hand, the Madonna is carrying Jesus in her arms, it will mean the end of my hopes and confirmation that I am pregnant.’
Godelieve went to see the Virgin in its glass case at the corner of Zwarte-Leertouwersstraat, the one for which she had made a lace veil. Alas, she was carrying the infant Jesus. The same was true of the statue of the Virgin that dominates the console, with its foliage and rams’ heads, on the façade of the Draper’s Hall and of the Virgin by Michelangelo in Saint Saviour’s. There were only a few statues of the Virgin Mary with empty arms to compensate for the accumulation of ill omens, but they all bore, beneath them, a reproachful inscription: ‘I am the Immaculate
Conception’. And the scroll on which it was written was undulating, like the flaming sword of the cherubim guarding the entrance to paradise.
Godelieve fled, conscious of her lost chastity, as distressed and frightened by the reproachful statues as by those of ill omen.
What was the verdict of heaven going to be? Thus she spent days consulting the oracle of the Madonnas, in churches, at crossroads, on gables, letting her life depend on these chance encounters.
She multiplied her prayers, her propitiatory candles, made a vow to go to the next Procession of the Penitents in Veurne, started a novena, quickly went to confession because God cannot see those who are obscured by too dark a sin. That was the time of the Octave of the Holy Blood, the procession in May during which one single drop of the blood of Jesus Christ, brought back by the Crusaders, is borne round the town with great pomp, amid white choirs of the children taking first communion, rose petals, golden banners, monks of all the orders. For the whole week Godelieve exhausted herself in fasting, pain, penances, prayers.
On the Sunday, when the little shrine, a jewelled bush, appeared in the bright sunshine of the street, Godelieve was seized with violent trembling, immense hope. The Holy Blood had passed. She felt the wound of her sex open once more…
After that everything was changed between her and Joris. God had taken her back. Did she not also belong to God? She had yielded to Joris’s desire, out of pity and to make his heart less sad. It was time to stop saddening the heart of God. He had shown such mercy. He had saved her – and saved both of them with her – from what would have been a triple disaster, ruins piled up round a cradle. In return she must no longer trespass against God, must not fall back into sin. She had promised that to her confessor who, with his wise counsel and a new plan of life, had restored order to her soul.
Joris, for his part, continued to take her hands and her lips when they chanced to meet, on the stairs and in the corridors.
Godelieve would slip out of his grasp, pushing him away gently but firmly. He stubbornly kept writing to her, his passion roused all the more by the feeling of distance while they were so close, moved to pathos by the anguish they had just shared, the sense that they had both died a little in what, perhaps, had never been. But she hardly ever replied now, at most she would occasionally slip him a short letter devoid of passion, encouraging his soul, calling herself his elder sister and his dead bride, talking of the future with the hope that they might come together again one day, if God willed, not in sin but in joy and lawful union.
XI
Autumn closed in. An autumn of dead leaves, an autumn of dead stones in a town in decline. It was the great week of the sadness of Bruges, the Octave of the Dead during which it wraps itself in mist and bells, sinking into even more inconsolable melancholy…
It is not only the dead who are commemorated. We also remember our personal griefs, dreams that died, hopes that faded, everything that existed inside us and died. Joris suffered from his sad love that was beginning to seem as if it was no longer.
Day by day Godelieve was drawing further away from him.
Already affected by the terrible scare and influenced by her father confessor, whose advice she followed faithfully, she quickly resolved not to fall back into sin, which also brought danger with it. Oh, Joris struggled against God, but the struggle was brief. Still he missed her, longed for her, for her embrace which was so different from Barbara’s. With Godelieve he felt she gave herself and took nothing. A gift to make him feel less sad.
She brought balm, she brought oblivion. Being in her arms was like being in a sheltered cove, away from the restlessness of the open sea. And now she had taken it back, denying him first her lips, then her hands and, all the more, any meeting outside the house, which he could no longer hope for.
She hardly even wrote to him any more, only occasionally – and such calm letters! Joris realised she had been conquered by fear and by faith, was turning away from him without too much of a wrench and with calculated touches of gentleness. ‘Let us purify ourselves,’ she said to him. ‘Our love will be all the greater for being chaste and strengthened by waiting.’ She spoke to him of Saint Theresa and of their own union which had, after all, been a mystical marriage. And even her letters, short and purified of passion as they were, made her seem more distant, so that he loved her as one would love someone in their absence. And is not absence half way to death?
Godelieve was half dead to him. He mourned her during the Octave of the Dead when, high up in the belfry, in the grey air of a northern November, he felt more than ever that the whole town was in the grip of death. From up there it seemed empty, like a town seized with lethargy. The canals stretched out, inert, and the foliage, thinned out by the north wind as the willows prostrated themselves, moved on them as if on tombs. Despite the distance one could make out, all round the doors on the front of the churches, cards announcing obits, trentals, requiems, anniversary masses for the dead – death’s notice board!
A thousand images of mourning came up from the town to the top of the bell-tower and Borluut observed them with rising sadness. His soul was in harmony with them. The greyness was in his soul as well, the dreary atmosphere of All Hallows. Joris felt alone.
Godelieve’s few words – which, so long ago, had gone with him into the tower, laughed as they climbed the stairs, settled and lived there for a long time – had died. A few tender words which
were the voice of Godelieve and which, at one point, had become embodied in a bell and sung with the carillon.
In those days the carillon had been joyful and in listening to it Joris had been listening to his own heart. He had not even heard the other bells making their way through the sky above Bruges.
Now – was it because of the more sonorous atmosphere at this season, because he had been made more sensitive by sorrow or because of the week devoted to the dead in which the sound of the parish bells was more insistent? – Borlu
ut only heard the other bells. He was amazed that he had hardly noticed them before, up there in the tower. The carillon had rung out loud and clear, the whole tower vibrated under his fingers, so to speak, and the song that emanated from him returned to him.
During that week it was the bells of the churches that flooded his being. The carillon, the voice of past days but dominated now, drowned out by other sounds, kept on giving cheerful advice:
‘Live! You must live!’ But the tolling of the church bells proclaimed death and sent out funeral processions into the air.
There was the knell of Saint Saviour’s, trundling along like a hearse; the great bell of Our Lady’s draping a catafalque of sound over the town; the little bells of the Beguinage wearing the white of mourning for a virgin; the bell of Saint Walburga’s making its way in widow’s weeds. Still others, farther off, came from the innumerable chapels and convents, like a flight of souls in torment swirling round in the wind, looking for the houses that had already forgotten them, assailing the bell-tower, going to kiss its gold clock face as if it were a communion plate.
Borluut himself was hovering amid death. The bells of the carillon fell in with it, their music too became funereal. The belfry sang of the end of love, mourned Godelieve in a flutter of slow, soft notes, as if the bell-tower were just another humble church and its bells were summoning parishioners to prayers of intercession for the dead.
Then their song expanded. The carillonneur, ashamed of his personal grief, fired the keys to expansive meditations – and the big bells joined in, sounding out the requiem of Bruges, soon dominating the tiny sounds of the other bells, absorbing all the obscure deaths into the death of the town, a fitter harmony to reach to the horizons.
XII
Joris had believed he would be able to win Godelieve back from her fear and from God. One day he realised his hopes were close to being dashed. As they were separating to go to bed and Barbara was a little in front of them, she furtively slipped an envelope into his hand. Overcome with joyful agitation, he hurried to his room, thinking he was about to read another letter after the long, disheartening silence, a letter full of tenderness, of new beginnings. The envelope contained nothing written at all, simply
a ring, one of the two wedding rings they had exchanged that evening in the church, in an ecstasy of mutual love.
‘Oh, that is cruel – and pointless,’ thought Borluut, overcome, though more with discouragement than distress. He put it in a drawer without thinking, reflecting on this final trial, the clear sign this time. It was truly the end, the final link in a broken chain that no longer united them. In this Joris saw the hand of her father confessor, his advice to break completely with him, to remove the least occasion for sin, even – above all – the insidious little jewel that signified their pact.
However Barbara, her suspicions aroused, had not ceased her watchfulness. For weeks, for months, it was as if her every nerve were tensed, her whole being concentrated on finding certainty.
Every evening she went to check the light under Godelieve’s door and she had noticed that she was writing less. When her sister went out, she accompanied or followed her. As for Joris, she took advantage of his absences to search through his clothes, his drawers. She was almost convinced, but she needed evidence, evidence that would be undeniable, conclusive proof with which she could confront the guilty pair.
Joris, careless as ever, with the abstracted mind, the unfocused gaze of the man coming back from the bell-tower, had casually thrown Godelieve’s ring into the drawer where he had already put his own. One day, as night was falling, Barbara found the two rings in the course of her investigations. They were in a corner, among some innocuous papers. At first she paid them scant attention. It was only when an inscription on the inside caught her eye that she looked more closely; there was the name of each of them – Godelieve and Joris – and a date.
It was the date above all that stood out. It coincided, as Barbara quickly realised, with that of her departure for the spa, the opportune moment when they were left alone together.
Barbara’s remaining doubts were swept away; she held the proof in her hands, the silent, sacred witness. The certainty sent her wild with fury, every nerve called to action, arrows quivering to be despatched.
Joris came back not long afterwards. It was dinner time and he went to the dining-room, where Godelieve was already waiting.
Barbara was on the lookout, at the top of the stairs, breathing heavily, her head ringing, but content with the knowledge, as if relieved of all the suspicions, signs, clues, that elusive burden she had borne for months. Now it all came down to these two rings, and she held them so tight, in such a feverish grasp that at times she almost crushed them like two flowers.
When the guilty couple were together, she rushed down. Her entrance was like a thunderbolt: ‘Miserable wretches!’
The cry was emitted by a voice that was completely changed, a panting voice, as if she had been running for a long time.
Immediately Godelieve foresaw a catastrophe. Joris watched, anxious to know just how much Barbara suspected.
Barbara repeated, ‘Oh, you two miserable wretches!’
She swooped on Joris. ‘I know everything!’
And she showed him the rings, clinking in the quivering jewel case of her palm, tiny, humble, appearing to ask pardon for having given them away.
And she laughed derisively, a madwoman’s arpeggio of chilling laughter.
Then she turned to face Godelieve. ‘As for you – off you go! Off you go! Leave my house!’
She was going to push her, use force; Joris stood between them.
At that her anger exploded with the fury of a raging sea that nothing could hold back, an onslaught of pebbles and wreckage, a spattering of foam that left Joris and Godelieve feeling wounded, sullied to the very depths of their being.
While she was heaping abuse on them she suddenly threw their two gold rings at them, like missiles. ‘There you are! You can keep them, your rings!’
Her face seemed to be breaking up, like ice floes in a thaw. And she kept on repeating, like a hiccup, a refrain of despair: ‘It’s disgusting! Disgusting!’
Joris and Godelieve remained silent, not daring to utter a word to mollify her, to calm things down.
Provoked even more by their silence and furious that the rings had not hit either of them, Barbara, beside herself with fury, grabbed an old Delft vase from the sideboard and flung it with all the force she could muster at Joris’s head. He fended it off, but the blue vase crashed into the mirror, which immediately cracked.
The vase fell onto the marble fireplace, smashing to pieces with a long, piercing noise which maddened Barbara even more. In that moment she saw herself in the mirror, her face appearing cut in two by a gash running from top to bottom.
She felt as if her head were splitting as well and, completely distraught, grasped other objects and threw them at the guilty pair standing there before her, aghast and pale, trying to stop her, to take cover, unable to get away since she was blocking the door, wild-eyed, foaming at the mouth, rabid, driven mad by the
pain, by her pride, by the wound in the mirror which she thought she could feel on her face – widening, and all the more terrible for not bleeding – by the crash of all the things she was throwing at the walls and the windows, breaking crystal, vases, candlesticks, sending them flying across the room and falling to the floor in fragments, seized with a destructive furor, a frenzy to lay waste to everything around her, since there was nothing but ruins in her heart.
And when the carnage was over, weary and ashamed, she let out a long cry and left, sobbing along the corridors.
Joris and Godelieve were alone once more.
They did not say a word. Joris had the impression the whole world had collapsed around him. He felt as if he were in an empty space, in some depths where his fall had broken everything. As if he had fallen from the height of the bell-tower, from the height of their love, which had climbed as h
igh as the tower. He was overcome with a disheartening feeling that something irreparable had happened. He saw himself as beyond life; and the drama he had just lived through appeared very distant, very old, as if it had happened in a former existence to a dead man who resembled him.
Certainly the old love-story had come to a sorry end. It was the woman’s fault for being afraid, for giving up too soon; and he had not been insistent enough. By denying themselves they had drawn the chastisement down on themselves.
Now it was like a dream, as if it had never been.
All at once he was pulled out of the chaos of his thoughts and brought back to reality by Godelieve who was standing there, holding out her hand, looking as if she was about to leave him.
‘What are you going to do?’ Joris asked.
‘As you see,’ Godelieve replied with the voice of one in mortal agony, ‘I can’t stay here.’
‘Yes,’ said Joris, ‘let’s leave.’
And, feeling alone in the silent disaster, he tried to cling onto her, to draw her to him, to hold her again in that moment when he felt his whole life slipping from him, when he had to think of making a new future for himself. Godelieve broke away, more afraid of what was about to happen than of what had happened. She withdrew to the other end of the room and said, in a faraway voice, as if in a dream, ‘You must stay here, Joris. Your life is here, your work and your fame.’
Then she said, in a stronger voice, ‘As for me, I’ll go to the Beguinage in Diksmuide tomorrow.’
Joris knew it was irrevocable, the precipitate execution of a plan she had probably been considering for some time. It was less Barbara’s discovery and the terrible scene which were separating them than the fact that their wills were already apart. It is not events that are the cause of things. They merely conform to ourselves, bringing out what is already there inside us. Here it was God who had started everything. He was the one who triumphed.
Godelieve had the strength to separate. ‘Farewell, Joris,’ she said, one last time. ‘I will pray to God, for us .’
The Bells of Bruges Page 17
