Just as the boys were about to go back outside, they were stopped by the cousin, who clapped Urbain on the shoulder and shouted, “It’s a sight to see, ain’t it!”
Gagging at the rancid smell of the hand that had touched his shirt, Urbain nodded, a meek sheep that has stopped bleating and is willing to do anything if somebody will only make this stop. But it did not stop. The cousin dragged them along to the back of the building, where the thudding of heads in tubs and the dry, rhythmic banging of the cleavers was drowned out by the sound of grinding wheels and the whipping of huge leather driving belts. Here the boiled sludge was poured into tanks where it sloshed and eddied like bubbling magma as it drained away into a hole. What ran out of the rusty, filth-encrusted spout at the other end was—the cousin shouted in their ears—the basis for gelatin. It was poured into fifty-liter barrels, which were then fitted with round lids screwed on by men with large leather gloves.
The nephew, who was apparently the factory foreman, made a sweeping gesture toward the courtyard, where sparse grass grew between the rocks, and animal hides awaited tanning in another building. A large horse cart hurtled past, filled with barrels. They’re taking that wonderful stuff to a processing plant, he said, where they filter it and take care of the smell. From there, it goes to every corner of the country, where they use it in all sorts of products. It’s in all the fancy lotions for French-speaking ladies. It’s what they rub on their noses and their dainty little cheeks. He snickered. It’s in your bottle of gum arabic, and it’s in the candies you suck on like manna from heaven. It’s in the jam your mother makes for you; she spreads it on your sandwich, you’re none the wiser. You’re full of the stuff that comes pissing and dribbling out of those heads, dear boys, you’re full of that rot, but you don’t know it, because they can deodorize and filter and disinfect it until you no longer realize it’s death you’re sucking into your hungry little mouths, it’s this sludge that those ladies of fashion are rubbing into their tender bosoms—fine bubbles of saliva sprayed from his mouth—it’s all one and the same thing, but nobody knows. Good thing, too, otherwise the world would stop turning. He laughed, exposing his yellow teeth, hiccupped, and gave the thunderstruck boys a look of pity. The diabolical gleam in his eyes reminded my grandfather of the senseless idiocy of the goat in their small city courtyard. It was that senseless, slow-witted smile that would come back to him later, under circumstances then unthinkable, as he drifted between sleep and waking in the ice-cold mud, mulling over the things he had seen that day—the sludge of the world, which he absorbed for lack of any choice.
And all the snow-on-the-mountain and Queen Anne’s lace, all the swaying plants that lined the avenue like a host of wayward angels, calling out to them that the world was not so bad, all things that rustled, moved, and lived by the roadside that late summer, the turtle dove cooing monotonously to the soft sighs of the silver poplar, the last of the tortoiseshell butterflies and red admirals, a garden warbler in a pear tree—it was as if they could not hear it, could not see it, as if they had been robbed of all their senses. They walked side by side in silence, only nodding goodbye when their ways parted, in the late sun slanting over the first crooked houses of the city, bathing them in yellow evening light as if someone were shining a huge lamp on the world to illuminate a secret that nobody wanted to see.
—
One thing sticks in his mind in the days that follow: the sight of the animal heads in the gory courtyard. In his memory, the gentle glow of afternoon is falling over that heap of breathtaking ugliness, and what he sees are colors, tones, the subtlest transitions of light and shade, grays and red, sepia and midnight blue, crimson turned almost black, the delicate yellow, nearly white, of a scrap of undamaged hide by a dead snout. He thinks back to one of the old books he’s seen his father leafing through—more specifically, to one painting that made a strong impression on him even as a small child: a skinned bull, painted by the famous Rembrandt. In that painting, a thing that in itself could not be called attractive was altered into a spectacle possessing power and beauty. This antithesis gnaws at his innards. It slowly dawns on him, as he stares into the roaring stoke hole in the iron foundry and the sparks dance around him like fireflies, that his shock of revulsion at the sight of that apocalyptic heap of rotting flesh filled with gaping dead eyes has awoken something that tugs at him, that hurts, that opens a new space inside him—that for the first time he feels a desire that seems greater than himself. It is the desire to draw and paint, and the instant he becomes aware of it, just as he’s picked up another heavy ladle filled with molten iron, it’s as if his knees fail him. The sudden realization washes over him with overwhelming force, in which there is an element of guilt. The realization that he wants to do what his father does—mingled with the bitter, shooting pain of missing his father—makes him want to drop that ladle of glowing fire on the ground, immediately, right now, and run to a place that is bright and quiet, like the churches and chapels where he spent so many days of his childhood at his father’s side, and where his father retouched an angel’s hand, while light descended in a glass-stained ray of color and the silence was so complete that the minuscule scrape of the brush against the wall filled the whole interior. It wells up inside him like a sob, like a painful, electric shock from deep within, where his unconscious has taken its time to ripen before coming to light, there—amid that hellish noise, the hammering and shouting, the dragging and heaving, the rattling and clanging—he dreams of a heavenly silence, there in the heart of the dark, fire-smoldered vault of the workshop filled with toiling phantoms.
And he cries. He wails as he clasps his stinging hands around the rough wooden handle of that damnable ladle of fire and tries to concentrate, to behave himself, to do what he ought; but in that flash he knows that he no longer wants to do what he ought, that he wants to be like his absent father. I want to draw and paint, booms the voice within him, I want to draw, I want to learn to draw, and he fights with the dark force that shakes him and refines him. And all through the day, as he sorts iron, as he eats his sandwiches or makes his way over the precarious gangways down which all the men in the foundry saunter and shuffle the whole confounded twelve-hour day, all that day not another word comes out of his mouth.
Are you ill, Urbain?
He shakes his head no.
They leave him alone.
As he arrives home, hours late again because a demanding customer just had to have his moldings delivered to his house that very day, his legs feel wobbly. His clogs have cracked in the heat, and a splinter is poking painfully into the arch of his right foot. He goes to his room without saying a word and creeps silently into bed. He thinks of his father and lets his tears flow freely.
—
Even though his father has often advised against it, in 1906 he begins taking drawing classes at St. Luke’s night school, where Le Frère Professeur de Dessin teaches him to draw “line after line, no end of lines.” This soon starts to irritate and discourage him; it is not what he dreams of doing. With some guilt, he remembers his father’s command: “Do whatever you like with your life, but for God’s sake, don’t start drawing and painting. You can see what’s become of me. This is not sixteenth-century Florence—remember that.” But what makes up his mind is the memory of the hours spent in churches with his father, whom he finds himself missing more and more. So in the months that follow, he spends two evenings a week bowed over his drawing paper, red-faced, in his clumsy fist a piece of graphite sharpened with his pocketknife. First exercise: Straight lines. Lines slanting to the right. Lines slanting to the left. Vertical lines. Intersecting lines. Lines of different lengths. And when he begins to get the hang of that, they start over in charcoal.
Recommencez, Urbain! Begin again!
Lines, lines, lines. He sees lines through the window, lines through the clouds, lines through the eyes of his friends, lines through his dreams.
He falls asleep over his paper and dreams of a cast-iron sea from which breaker
s with fiery crests roll onto an endless white beach. After class, he barely notices that the other boys are striking up conversations, stopping off for a drink. He goes home and sees lines, he hates lines, he falls behind at work, he has ruined two molds in the past few weeks, and the foreman shouts at him. After a while he starts missing classes and is reprimanded by Le Frère Professeur on the rare occasions when he does show up. He swallows his disappointment and lies in bed worrying as his mother’s sewing machine rattles downstairs, because she has to earn extra to pay for his lessons. Is it really worth all that? For an endless series of stupid lines? How will he ever restore an angel’s hand if he has to spend forever and a day making lines on third-rate paper? When he tells the foreman he can stay at work longer again in the evenings, he bears the man’s knowing chuckle in silence. But during those classes, he at least made a friend: a boy who had lost his right arm in an accident with a textile machine, but could draw left-handed with the best of them. He even made something of those lines: whole compositions, rhythmic variations, changing lengths, thicknesses, and weights, lines varying from faint to pitch dark, lines with personalities, lines long and short, armies of lines speaking a language inaudible but all the more visible, layer upon layer—it was as if he saw whole spaces inside them, endless dimensions and perspectives. They became hordes and armies, advancing throngs. They became buildings that existed only in that one-armed boy’s mind, posts along roads, side views of endless rows of barrack windows, a futuristic city, architectural fantasies, level upon level, a world of vanishing points that pulled you in, while Urbain’s drawing paper was filled with nothing but straight lines. At the end of the term, the boy was moved up to the next class: drawing blocks, cubes, rectangles, diamonds, and then volumes. And again, he turned those mindless exercises into miracles, storehouses of mysterious boxes you longed to break open so that you could discover his secret—blocks and more blocks, open rooms and galleries in miniature, concave and convex blocks, how did he do it? It seemed as if the boy was carried away by visions, like musical variations for charcoal and imagination, his upper body slightly turned as if he were always ready to leap inside, into the secret depths of the world he was drawing. The stump on the other side of his body, that puny stump inside his pinned-up sleeve, gently moved along with him, describing small circles, entirely of its own accord, driven by some strange force, and it somehow seemed to charge the exquisite lines drawn by the other hand with hidden meaning and power. My grandfather had seen how pathetic his own exercises looked by comparison, and maybe his admiration for the boy had led to his discouragement. But he did not forget the feverish determination of his one-armed friend, who might well have made up all those patterns even without the Cher Frère, since they weren’t even part of the assignment, but flowed directly from his hand, a world without cause or reason, simply taking shape.
On Friday evenings he sometimes strolled by the display window of De Gouden Pluim, the venerable art supply store still open for business in Vrijdagmarkt today. Sable brushes, compasses and pencils, brushes and cases, linen canvases and sketch pads all lay in the dimly lit display, and my grandfather would stand with his hands in his pockets and a hangdog look, staring at all those beautiful things, at the dream that had spat him out.
—
One day, the one-armed boy pops up beside him.
Urbain, why don’t you come to class anymore?
He shrugs and says nothing, his eyes glued to the display.
The boy says, Come with me, start over.
He stubbornly shakes his head no.
But after the one-armed prodigy is gone, he takes a deep breath, gathers his courage, and uses his scanty pocket money—since he hands over practically all his wages to his family—to buy a sketchbook and a few new pencils.
The following week, he wanders into the elegant bookstore on the corner of Voldersstraat and Veldstraat, which has art books in the window. He leafs through them a little, glancing around nervously now and then, taking in the illustrations, absorbing them into his mind, gazing at the hands and eyes in Van Dyck’s sublime portraits, at Tiepolo’s coiffures, turbans, windblown garments, muscular shoulders and copulating snakes, at the meek, downcast eyes of a girl in a painting by Jordaens, at the odd expression of an onlooker in a Piero della Francesca, at the delicate Palladian arches of villas in the background of frescoes, at the proud peacocks and parrots in De Hondecoeter’s imaginary avian parks, at colors and shapes that danced in his confused mind’s eye.
The store’s owner, Adolphe Hoste, a well-known figure in Ghent, is suddenly at Urbain’s side, inspecting him top to bottom, observing his soiled clothes, sniffing the penetrating odor of iron and crude grease that clings to him, eyeing the wooden clogs on his store’s fine parquet floor. He says, How much longer do you intend to paw at my expensive books with those grubby hands? If you don’t mean to buy anything, monsieur, then make yourself scarce.
Humiliated, he steps outside, cursing under his breath, and feels such strength welling up inside him that he could draw all those sketches and etchings, all those paintings and frescoes from memory, just you wait, he’ll show them a thing or two. He walks home, takes his sketch pad out of the drawer, sits down at the kitchen table, and while the other children are playing tag or hiding behind his legs under the chair, he tries to draw a biblical head, a thunder god, a patriarch, one with enough power to break the curse. He makes a terrible mess of it, a twisted face with clownish features, an unsightly thing that resembles the battered head of a dead bull. He throws the precious paper with its confused smudge of lines into the glowing belly of the roaring stove.
That entire winter, whenever he has a little energy left after dinner, he sits and draws. He starts by placing his left hand on the table and trying to draw it. The result is a distorted, evil-looking claw, the paw of a gryphon or some such creature, and he has fun transforming it into a genuine, bloodcurdling set of claws, which he shows the children: Look, a monster! Their shrieks sound like encouragement. He draws the stockpot. It comes out as a crooked, ridiculous lump of stupid charcoal lines. Two onions turn into peculiar lumps of coal. Well, then, he’ll draw lumps of coal, from memory, a big heap of them. That’s not so easy either. Now he has to make sure the coals don’t look like onions. Slowly, an apple starts to resemble an apple. A drawing pencil lies on the table. He copies it—oh, all right, draws it—with a thin shadow beside it. So that’s what those lines were good for. Ever so gradually, he gets over his intimate humiliations and begins to enjoy himself. He even takes pleasure in the drawings that don’t work, because they give him new ideas. And in that constant shape-shifting, those drifting metamorphoses, anamorphoses, and variations on related forms, a new world opens up to him in those long winter months, something he can come home to after a long working day, something he starts to look forward to during his lunch break, as he washes down his sandwiches with lukewarm coffee and tries not to listen to the roars of laughter and the macho tales of hands up women’s skirts, holes in toilet doors, randy serving girls in the scullery, the shapely buttocks of the mares by the inn, and other charming subjects of that nature.
He sits down in front of the mirror and tries to copy the lines of his own head. After an hour of scribbling, erasing, shading, and trying to grasp the outlines, the face that grimaces up at him from the paper is so hideous he has to laugh. When his mother comes to peek over his shoulder, he whisks the piece of paper away.
Come on, silly, let me see.
No, Mother, please, don’t.
He thinks of the one-armed boy, and of the dream world of lines and cubes.
He stuffs the densely scrawled sheets into the bottom of a drawer in the old cupboard in his bedroom, beneath his socks and underclothes. The next day, he starts over. Over and over, all winter. Spring comes, the other boys go out walking and swimming, on the first warm spring days they go boating with the girls on the Lys, but he sits at home alone and draws, while everyone else is outside, under the scudding white clou
ds and the warm air working its magic on the city. He is drawing and making progress, and as he sits there, all alone, he sometimes feels a kind of power inside him, a great, deep power that makes him feel like someone, someone who can do what others can’t. After his months of effort, it’s like reaching the top of a mountain. Don’t be naive, a different voice inside him says, there is no summit, you’ve barely begun, it’s a little clearing on the mountainside, a place to catch your breath, look down, and say, Just look how far we’ve come already. The thought fills him with quiet pride. But when he looks up—in other words, when he thinks of the reproductions in the bookstore he was asked to leave—he knows he has a long, steep road ahead. And even that doesn’t scare him anymore. He realizes how much he longs to see his father again so he can show him some of the sketches—there’s no doubt in his mind that his mother gave away his secret months ago in her letters. He wants to see his father, he wants his father back. He falls into a deep, dreamless sleep.
—
Our outings to Herckenrath, the successor to Adolphe Hoste’s bookstore, were like a solemn ritual. Never did my grandfather polish his black boots brighter than when we “visited Herckenrath.” Never did he make a more dignified and impressive entrance, while Mr. Herckenrath—known for his long-ago friendship with the late, great poet Karel van de Woestijne—was reshelving a few books pulled out by customers, somewhere in the back of the shop. As Mrs. Herckenrath looked on benignly, my grandfather would leaf through a few books in reverential silence, standing in front of the rows of glossy spines, sniffing discreetly when he saw one that appealed to him.
War and Turpentine Page 9
