Take heed, o man, and pray and save your soul.
It was like an annunciation from beyond the world, a song poured out from the very edge of eternity, a warning that death was on its way. Joris heard it and felt his miserable love wither inside him, die inside him…
At that moment a heavenly sight burst upon him, making him feel ashamed. It was the religious procession, which follows the penitents and which he had not seen the first time. White muslin fluttered, the enchantment of dawn after the storm and the night-dark hoods. Virgins, members of various orders, altar boys robed in red, priests, clerics in gold dalmatics that blazed like stained-glass windows. Carried along on the air were snowstorms of roses, garlands of hymns with the scales of the sopranos, the plainchant of the deacons, deciphered from their antiphonies. And the canopy appeared, surrounded by torchbearers and thurifers swirling their silver censers in a jingle of chains. As one, all the bystanders fell to their knees, brought together in the faith by the blue ribbons of the incense.
Joris was carried away. He knelt as well, prayed, worshipped, becoming part of the crowd’s acquiescence. For a while he lost himself in the ancient faith of Flanders and forgot Godelieve.
But in the evening, when he went back to his room in the hotel to get ready to leave, he felt alone and weary unto death. Memories of the Procession of Penitents came to mind. His destiny was fixed irrevocably. He had not succeeded in establishing contact with Godelieve. There would be no consolation. He did not even have a handkerchief such as Saint Veronica’s. His career was ruined. He was about to return to his joyless home, where he would live out the rest of his days between his regret for Godelieve and his horror of Barbara. At that moment, framed in the open window, he saw again the innumerable crows ceaselessly flying from the church to the belfry, from the belfry to the church, a swarm tossed to and fro, an ebb and flow of wings, a black wave breaking on itself, turning in the air, constantly starting again. Was it not an image of his future? Black thoughts wheeling back and forth between two joys that were closed to him.
VI
In the belfry Borluut found a refuge, a dream world where he could forget. Once more, every time he climbed up there he had the feeling he was leaving behind his troubles, himself and the world. It was a spell that never failed to work. Hardly had he started to climb the spiral staircase, than he suddenly felt at peace. In the impenetrable gloom he could no longer see his wounded soul. The wind blew in from the open sea, came down to meet him, to greet him, sweeping across his face, waking him to a new existence in which everything else disappeared like a nightmare.
He withdrew to the tower every day now, spending long hours there, even when it was not required by the carillon. It became his true abode, his place of voluntary exile. How fortunate he was that they had not also removed him from his position as carillonneur. It would be the death of him to have to spend all his time among people. He was so different from them. He had become too much accustomed to seeing things from a higher vantage
point than them, as they must be viewed from eternity. What had he been thinking to try and bring about a reign of beauty? His town had banished him, in a sense, for trying to impose his ideal on it and for not thinking in the same way as it did. Now he was alone.
In his solitary refuge he felt a kind of intoxication, a darkly voluptuous pleasure. Was not the belfry solitary as well, rising above the dwellings below? The belfry was taller than they were, had risen higher in the conquest of the air. Climbing it, Borluut was also raising himself up, becoming the belfry himself, surrounding himself with it like a suit of armour that fitted him. Oh, the solitary joys of a pride that towers above the world below and looks into the far distance.
Autumn returned, autumn which is the season of mist in Flanders.
Borluut rejoiced in it. It increased his isolation in the tower, new curtains thickening round him and hiding the world, which was starting to become abhorrent to him. The only thing that, in the distance, still attracted him, communicated with him, was nature, eternal in its monotony of plains, trees and sky. He no longer wanted to see the town, spread round the foot of the tower. He had suffered too much there. Moreover he no longer recognised it, already disfigured by structures that did not belong, modern intrusions and the sin of vanity increasing inside it.
Bruges had been taken over by others. Like Godelieve, it had left him.
Thank goodness for the late-autumn fog which at the moment was spreading its blanket over all these loves that were now a thing of the past. Borluut shut himself away in double isolation. To the prison of stone was added the prison of mist.
All that held him captive now was the wide horizon.
Everything was unified in a renunciation of self, a soft, resigned fusion. The flocks of sheep, frequent in the countryside around, appeared as nothing more than a little additional vapour, which had gathered at one point and was going to disperse. Even the sun became anaemic, turned the colour of pewter and disappeared amid diaphanous banks of tulle. The town as well, enveloped in a layer of mist, receded, losing solidity and colour, and ceased to be. All that was left of it were a few drifts of smoke from the invisible roofs which, docile tributaries of the mist, soon gave up.
Borluut was part of this collective effacement. The autumn mists and the smoke pervaded him, too, as he watched their silent motions from the belfry above. Everything blurred inside him, misted over, erased itself.
In the pale flatlands some windmills were just visible, black crosses looking as if they were exorcising the mist, which
avoided them, drew back, afraid. Borluut often sent his eyes travelling from mill to mill, counting the crosses. They reminded him of the crosses in the Procession of the Penitents. Were they not the same ones, now dispersed? They were scattered over the land, taking him as far as Veurne, which could be just made out, away to the west, close to the sea ever shimmering on the line of the horizon.
Borluut sought out Veurne. He sought out Diksmuide as well and Godelieve’s face returned, piercing the mist…
However autumn was coming to a close. The windmills too paled, were absorbed into the mist. There were no more crosses to remind him, and no more memories.
Borluut would spend hours listless and drawn in on himself, with no regrets and no hope, alone in the glass chamber of the belfry.
The soul reflected in the season! On the carillon he only played wan melodies. Muted tunes, white notes the colour of the mist itself, colourless sounds, as if the bells were made of cotton wool and were shedding a slow downdrift of flakes and carded wool, a scattering of down from the pillow of the child he never had.
VII
What Borluut had foreseen happened. It was his guiding hand alone that had maintained the unity and discipline of his vision. He had been on his way to accomplishing the miracle of creating a harmony of beauty for a whole town. As soon as he had been dismissed, the sacrilege commenced. The man who was named as his replacement was an obscure and ignorant architect who quickly became a willing tool of the aldermen’s every whim.
Borluut felt his dream was over. It was the end of the beauty of Bruges as he had conceived it, as a harmonious whole. Every day the dissonance increased, the profanation, the vandalism, the anachronisms.
The town had given up.
The fashion for restoration had become general, but not at all in the way in which Borluut had started it. After having neglected the old façades and allowing them to deteriorate, people were now going too far in the opposite direction, reviving, repairing, modifying, decorating and renovating them. In fact, what they were doing was reconstructing them. They were new buildings, parodies of the past, facsimiles of old architecture like the copies of ancient buildings in concrete and painted canvas you see in exhibitions. Neatness and tidiness were the order of the day. People wanted their brickwork nice and pink, and nice and new, light-oak window frames, crisp, clear carving. Out went the blurred faces – the heads of angels, monks, demons – which hardly break the surface, havin
g withdrawn a little into the walls over
the centuries. Out, too, went the black dust, the severe patina or ornamentation of bricks that had been allowed to mature.
People wanted houses that were ‘as good as new’. A barbarous craze, like that of having old pictures scraped clean, repainted and revarnished.
At the same time some architectural curiosities disappeared, their owners believing the sites could be put to more profitable use; picturesque districts were altered. The face of a town can change so quickly. Demolition, reconstruction, watercourses filled in, tramways laid. Oh, the horror of the noise, the whistles, steam and jolts defiling the nobility of silence!
A collective profanation! The brutal utilitarianism of the modern age! No doubt in Bruges, too, they would straighten the streets, shorten the connections. And it would be even worse if the Seaport project were realised. It had already been decided, according to the plan submitted, that the Ostend Gate would disappear, the tower and rooms that were such an ornament to the town, a delightful buckle fastening the belt of the ramparts. It was to be sacrificed to widen the road leading to the new docks.
As long ago as 1862 and 1863 they had already knocked down St Catherine’s Tower then the Byre Tower, survivors of the nine towers which had originally stood guard on the threshold, proclaiming the rule of art. Now it was the end.
‘The town of the past, the town I had made, is in its death throes,’ Borluut said to himself. ‘Its splendid walls are going to fall. I alone preserve, I alone carry in my heart everything that was Bruges. Soon I will be all that is left of the town here below.’
Borluut lamented the fate of Bruges as he lamented his own.
There were other torments that were sapping his strength. Barbara continued to be irritable, sometimes responding vehemently. He hardly saw her, only at meals. She now lived completely apart.
She had retired to a different floor of the house, the second storey, which she had appropriated for herself in order to be alone and free. Sometimes she went out on a whim, wandered round for hours on end, only returning when it was dark. At others she shut herself away and plunged into long periods of nervous exhaustion which would end in fits of tears and shrill sobs.
Joris could do nothing to help, feeling himself so far away from her. Anyway, she had completely withdrawn from him. Since she had discovered his unfaithfulness she had not lain with him. She felt a kind of fear of him, a physical revulsion. It seemed to her that if she gave herself to him now, she would be the one committing adultery, as if Joris belonged more to Godelieve than to her. All carnal relations between them had ceased.
Borluut resigned himself to his life as a quasi-widower, to a return to celibacy with no way out. Why had he not done something to remedy the situation? He went over the reasons: for a long time, despite the outbursts, the quarrels, the scenes, he could not prevent himself from feeling bound to Barbara, to the body he still desired, to her too-red lips; later, after all the squabbles, all the insults, which wearied him and released him from her, he could have left her, but Barbara, with her rabid Catholicism, would never have consented to a divorce (and he would not have found any legal grounds); later still, when he was in love with Godelieve, that would have been the time to make a clean break, to abandon his home and set one up elsewhere; but then it had been the town that had held him back, his commitment to the beauty of Bruges, his poem in stone, which was still awaiting completion; his regret at leaving it unfinished would have followed him everywhere with the persistence of remorse; finally, when he had fallen from favour and was free in that respect, ready to go anywhere, he had been unable to win back Godelieve, who already belonged to God and to eternity.
Thus everything had conspired against him. He had never had control over events, over his own destiny. And now there seemed to be no point in leaving Barbara. Where would he go if not to even greater solitude? He felt incapable of making any kind of fresh start. He was weary. His life was a failure, with no hope of remedy.
Here at least he still had the belfry which provided an inalienable refuge. More than ever he found himself climbing the grisaille stairs to the glass chamber, to the granaries of silence, the dormitories of the bells, the bells that never dozed off, confidants he could trust, friends who would comfort him.
Only the Bell of Lust aroused him once again. He had almost forgotten it. It was lying in wait for him. His long period of continence left him open to its onslaught. The temptation of the breasts he saw once more, tips thrusting out, hardened in the metal as if in eternal desire! And the buttocks too, tensed, arching under the kisses. He became obsessed with the flesh to the point of madness. He scrutinised the bronze for the precise details of the lechery. He took part in it. He was living amid a frozen orgy. He recalled the thrill when the obscene bell had revealed to him his carnal love for Barbara. How he had dreamt of her body, still unknown, as he looked up the bell as he would have looked up her dress. A bell full of sensual pleasures and which was Barbara’s dress. It had shattered his life, Barbara’s cold dress, as hard as the bronze, only giving the appearance of passion, a frozen simulation of pleasures which came to nothing.
Oh, the evil spell cast by the Bell of Lust! At least Joris had been on his guard the second time. He was afraid of it when he was in love with Godelieve.
He had even stopped her approaching it, on the day when she had climbed the bell-tower with him…
Since his love-life was non-existent, he became the lover of all the women on the bell. It was to him that they were giving themselves. He was living in a whirl of lips and breasts. As he bent down for a closer look, his face touched the icy bronze, giving him a burning sensation, as if he had kissed skin that was on fire. He embraced every sin.
When he came back down from the tower, he would spend a long time wandering round the town, late at night, feverish with a desire for bare flesh. The obscene scenes of the bell followed him, taking shape in enlarged, living images. He would stay out late strolling along dubious alleys, towards the working-class districts, on the lookout for some unexpected encounter, a lighted window, perhaps, which some woman, unhappy in love, might open – all the things we do at twenty, tormented by the sap rising in our veins.
VIII
By isolating himself, by constantly taking refuge in the bell-tower, Borluut came to relish death alone.
From the top of the belfry the town appeared more dead, that is, more beautiful. The people disappeared from the streets, the noises died away before they reached him. The Market Square stretched out, grey and bare. The canals were at rest, their waters not going anywhere; they were bereft of boats, redundant, apparently living on after their own death.
The houses along the canals were closed up, as if there had been a death in each one.
A funereal impression, the whole town in harmony! Borluut was exultant. That was how he had wanted Bruges to be. He had only devoted himself to restoring, perpetuating all these old stones because it gave him the sense, the joy of carving his own tomb.
He had only sought and secured the carillon the better to celebrate and proclaim the death of the town to the four horizons. Even now, when he played, running his hands over the keyboard, it made him feel as if he were gathering flowers, tearing them, with great effort, from resistant stems, persevering all the same, bringing in his harvest, pillaging the flower-beds of the bells and then pouring baskets of petals, bouquets of sound, garlands of iron, over the town in its coffin.
Was that not the way it ought to be? The beauty of Bruges lay in being dead. From the top of the belfry it appeared completely dead to Borluut. He did not want to go back down ever again. His love for the town was greater, was endless. From now on it was a kind of frenzy, his final sensual pleasure. Constantly climbing high above the world, he started to enjoy death. There is danger in rising too high, into the unbreathable air of the summits.
Disdain for the world, for life itself brings its own punishment.
It was doubtless for that reason, and
because of a clear warning from his instinct, that he had felt he was taking the key to his tomb when he had been handed the key to the tower.
Henceforth, when he returned from the bell-tower he had the impression he was leaving death. How tiresome to come back to the world, to life! And the ugliness of human faces! The hostility of the people he encountered! Stupidity and vice openly flaunted!
More and more the carillonneur wandered about aimlessly. He did not know where to go, no longer having anything to do, incapable of coming to any decision, of exercising his will. He found the life he had resumed tedious, like Lazarus brought back from the dead and still benumbed by the shroud. His steps faltered. He stumbled over the cobbles as if he were making his way across the humps and bumps of a graveyard. The fact was that coming down from the bell-tower he continued to walk in death .
IX
All of a sudden the town decked itself with flags. Telegrams had come from the capital announcing that parliament had finally passed the Seaport of Bruges project. They were no longer simply hoping, expecting possible delays – the millions they needed had been voted, the work of destruction could begin.
Immediately the streets were filled with jubilation, a Sunday, holiday mood, a feeling of joy spread by the crowd, unaware that they were happy because the reign of beauty was about to come to an end.
There had to be public rejoicing, an impressive demonstration to thank the government. At once a notice signed by the burgomaster and the aldermen was posted summoning all the societies of the town to form a huge procession that evening, with music and torches; at the same time the people were asked to put out their flags and Chinese lanterns.
They were to assemble in the Market Square at eight o’clock.
Borluut was informed that he would be on duty from the same time.
The Victory Bell, which was hung on a lower floor of the tower, would ring the whole time, would not cease its heroic gallop through the air. The carillon, too, was to let its peal ring out, a whole concert that would last as long as the procession.
The Bells of Bruges Page 22
