Rituals (3 page)

"Five thousand guilders," repeated Zita. "Your cheques are in the red cupboard." This was a new game. It excited him madly, but she did not smile. Or was that what was new?

"All right," he said.

The squaring of accounts, the settlement of a debt, the final payment for absence, the ultimate obliteration of a love, the swallowing up of all the time between that first glimpse at the photographic exhibition and the present moment, still involving the same two bodies, now began to take shape.

Many years later, when he would meet her again in a shabby hotel room in Palermo, he would ask her why, and she would not answer him because she knew he knew. Now, while that hotel room already existed but not yet the years that they would spend away from each other, he fetched the cheques from the red cupboard and signed them. She accepted them from him, still without a smile, got up and went to a corner of the room, where she took her wallet out of her handbag. She carefully slid the cheques into it, put the bag down, and still without smiling and with a frightening nonpresence that was a punishment but that may still have been part of a new game, she slowly undressed. She stood naked, looking at him, went to the bed, lay down, closed her eyes, and said, "Go on then." Already, and they knew it although they could not see it, there flowed in that room in Palermo, very softly, very gently, that which was the reason for which she would leave him and had left him — his weakness.

He undressed with that same hole-and-corner feeling he also had with real whores. She put her right hand to her mouth and made herself wet. Come, she said, but what did she want, he thought. That he would really treat her like a whore, or get so angry (pretend to get angry) that he would rape her (pretend to rape her)?

"I can't, like this," he said.

"You always can," she said. She put her hands on his neck and pushed his head beside her on the pillow so that they would not have to see each other. And so, a blind man mating with a blind woman, he came inside her for the last time in a great annihilating silence that still continued when she pulled away from underneath him and walked out of the room with her hand between her legs.

Inni stayed behind. He was aware of a great coldness, of fear and humiliation. Like someone, he thought, returning from a journey and finding his house full of broken glass, shit, and rubbish. While he lay wondering what to do, Zita phoned the bank from the other room and told them to stay open a few minutes longer because she had to collect a large sum in lire. Meanwhile, Inni's seed ran into the hand between her legs and fell through her fingers onto the floor. He heard her dressing and walking about the room, determined the direction of her steps, first barefooted, then in shoes, heard her briefly pausing by the threshold, hesitating, returning towards him, for a moment only and then no longer, and heard her say, already at the door, "Remember your horoscope, four o'clock is the deadline." And then he heard only the door and the November wind briefly chasing through it.

*       *

He sat down at his desk and finished the horoscope.

Through Utrechtsestraat, Keizersgracht, Spiegelstraat, Herengracht, Koningsplein, he reached
Het Parool's,
office on the Nieuwezijds, where he handed in his piece. And while Zita was on her way from the bank in the Vijzelstraat to the coffee house outside Central Station, where she had arranged to meet her Italian, Inni, immeasurably more slowly, walked homeward in the opposite direction. He stopped at Scheltema's, the Koningshut, Hoppe's, Pieper's, at Hansel and Gretel's, and at the Centrum Cafe. Never before had he been so drunk. It was night when he got home. He called out her name in the empty house and went on calling until the neighbours phoned to tell him to shut up. Only then did he find the note saying she was never going to come back, and as he held it in his hand and stared at it, he heard his own voice. "Leo, something dreadful will happen to you today, your wife will leave you and you will commit suicide." He knew what to do. He swayed about the room, knocking into chairs and tables, and went to the bathroom to hang himself, with some difficulty, from the highest point, where the central heating conduit and the water pipe were joined by a double ring before they disappeared into the ceiling.

*       *

The sky of death was a sky of grey clouds. They chased across the treetops along the canal. He woke up in a bed full of vomit, and with trembling fingers removed the tie from his neck. All over his body there were grazes, and there was blood on the sheet. As if someone had wound up a mechanism, he went to the bathroom, washed, shaved, took two Alka-Seltzers, refused to think of Zita, and left the house. On the corner of the Utrechtsestraat he bought a copy of the Handelsblad. He walked to Oosterling's, where he asked for two black coffees, and as usual, he turned to the financial pages first. The letters were bigger than usual, and slowly, as if he had suddenly grown much older, he read what it said. "At the urgent request of the Board of the Association of Stockbrokers, business closed at 20.45 following the death of the American president. After the appalling news that President Kennedy had been seriously, probably fatally injured, prices fell rapidly. The Dow-Jones average, which had initially risen by 3.31, fell to 711.49. This means a loss of 21.16 compared with Thursday's closing rate and is the sharpest drop since the panic wave on 28 May 1962."

He folded the paper and glanced for a moment at the photograph on the front page. The youthful president lay asleep on the rear seat of his huge car. The woman with the Oresteia mask at his side was standing up straight, staring at the large wine stains on her forever unforgettable costume. Of three things Inni was certain: Zita would never come back, he was not dead, and tomorrow the stock market would be spinning like a top. On the gold that he would buy the following Monday through his broker in Switzerland, he would, by 1983 when this fateful picture appeared for the ten thousandth time in all the weeklies of the world, have made more than a thousand per cent profit. The photograph was clear indeed: confused times were at hand.

II - ARNOLD TAADS 1953

Simili modopostquam coenatum est, accipiens et hunc

praeclarum Calicem in sanctas ac venerabiles manus suas;

item tibigratias agens, benedixit, deditque discipulis suis,

dicens: Accipite, et bibite omnes. Hic est enim Calix sanguinis

mei, novi et aeterni testamenti: mysteriumfidei: qui pro vobis

etpro multis effundetur in remissionem peccatorum.

Haec quotiescumque feceritis, in mei memoriam facietis

In like manner, as the supper ended, He took also this goodly cup in His holy and venerable hands, and again rendering Thee thanks, He blessed it, and gave it to His disciples, saying: "Take of it all of you and drink; For this is indeed the Chalice of My Blood, of the new and everlasting covenant, a mystery of faith, which is shed for you and for many for the remission of sins. Whenever this you do, it shall be in memory of Me "

FROM THE CANON OF THE HOLY MASS

ARNOLD TAADS 1953

U
NTIL
HE
MET
Philip Taads, Inni Wintrop had always thought that Arnold Taads was the loneliest man in the Netherlands. So it could be even worse. Here was someone who had had a father, true, but who had derived no benefit from the fact. Arnold Taads had never mentioned a son, thereby, thought Inni, condemning that son to a curious form of nonexistence which eventually led to that definitive form of nonexistence which is death.

Since father and son had, in complete isolation from each other and without consultation, opted for absolute absence, their only manifestation, as far as Inni was concerned, was possibly a presence in his thoughts. They made use of this fairly often. At the most unexpected hours and places they would loom up in his dreams or in those half-waking thoughts that are sometimes called reveries, and what they had never done during their lifetimes they did now: they appeared together, an unreal duo coming to his hotel room at night to frighten him with their all-destroying sadness.

His first encounter with Arnold Taads he would remember as long as he lived, if only because the memory was inextricably linked with his Aunt Therese, who herself had also committed suicide, albeit not in so planned a manner as the other two.

Only a few people per thousand commit suicide, a random little group such as you may see in the Lairessestraat in Amsterdam, waiting for the number 16 tram just before the rush hour. The peak of this statistic appeared to be in his vicinity, and statistics were infallible. From the number of self-murderers he had known — you had to put it that way, for the fact that someone died rounded off your knowledge of that person, if only because he or she could no longer present you with surprises — he was able to conclude that his circle of acquaintance must consist of a thousand people. If he were to invite all these voluntary dead to tea, two boxes of cream cakes from Berkhof's would scarcely suffice.

He divided the departed into two kinds, according to their method: slide and stairs. The first went, after some initial difficulty, automatically, while for the other method some exertion was needed.

Aunt Therese had gone by slide, that was certain. Drink and an infallible mixture of hysteria and lethargy had shown her the exit from the ballroom as if of its own accord, while the two Taadses had struggled tenaciously through whole labyrinths, interminably climbing stairs, finally to end up at the same point.

*       *

Inni Wintrop was one of those people who drag the time they have spent on earth behind them like an amorphous mass. This was not a thought he entertained daily, but one that recurred regularly and that already used to occupy him when he had had a considerably shorter past to carry about.

He was unable to estimate the time, measure it, divide it up. Perhaps it would be better to leave out the article here and say time, so as to give it all the tough syrupiness to which it is entitled. Nor was it only the past that clung to Inni's spoon in this manner; the future, too, was stubborn. A similarly formless space awaited him there, to be traversed by him without any clear indication as to which route he should take to get out of it. One thing was certain: the time he had lived was finished, but now that he was forty-five and had, by his own account, "crossed the frontier into the terrible without ever having been asked to show his passport", this amorphous thing containing both his memory and his lack of memory continued to accompany him as mysteriously and, even in reverse direction, as immeasurably as the universe about which there was so much discussion these days.

Somewhere in the grey milky mist of the early Fifties, in which the vigorous white bloom of the Korean War was still visible, there must have occurred that moment, less easily perceived, alas, when his Aunt Therese
(treize,
Therese,
ne perd jamais),
from whom a few years later he would inherit the foundation of his relative prosperity, had made her appearance in his lodgings at the Trompenbergerweg in Hilversum.

What made exercising his memory difficult was not only the fact that his apparatus was so limited ("I have no memory . . . You have clearly repressed everything . . . Can't you ever remember anything, for god's sake!") but also that, as he grew older, the available supports and footholds needed for a trip to the underworld of the past were beginning to disappear. That Aunt Therese had exchanged her tangible flesh for the blurred shadow which from time to time roamed through a dimly lit corridor of his brain was bad enough, as was the fact that the driver of the white Lincoln convertible had been killed in a crash together with the uncle who belonged to Aunt Therese. But worse than this was that the lodging house in which Inni had spent the first few years of his adult life had sunk without trace, together with his memories, into the hole from which would rise a clutch of eight service flats and which had sucked even the hydrangeas, chestnuts, larches, rhododendrons, and jasmines down into the depths from which nothing ever returns.

Nothing?

Those large, decaying houses, built once upon a time by former colonials, were themselves repositories of memories from an equally indisputably decayed era. They bore such names as Terang-Tenang or Madura, and the skinny, nervous, romantic Inni of those days could, especially in the soft fragrance of a summer evening, imagine himself to be living on a plantation somewhere near Bandzung, an impression strengthened further by the presence of colonial old timers who had their lodgings in that same, ridiculously large house. The smells of tropical food wafted through the villa, and there was a shuffling of slow slippers on the rush mats in the corridor, tongue clicking, and high, soft, strangely drawling voices saying things he did not understand but which he associated with books he had read by Couperus, Daum, and Dermout.

He hated his photographs from those days, not so much the ones in which he appeared together with other people — everyone looked equally ridiculous in those — no, the ones in which the attention could not be diverted from the person he had obviously been. He was on his own, posing, grim, imitating some statue and at the same time seeking the support of a tree, a gate, or any object that would presently occupy at least part of the picture so that he would not have to fill it all by himself. For what would such a photograph show? Someone so thin that he had been rejected for military service and, what was worse, who dared not therefore undress on a beach, someone who had been expelled from four different high schools and had quarrelled with his guardian so that the allowance his grandmother had so generously agreed to pay him had been stopped, someone who lost himself in the most desperate infatuations and spent his days in an office to be able to pay for his lodgings. A person of minimal independence.

This was how it must have been, more or less: he was sitting in his room when his landlord's Indonesian voice called him from the corridor.