Rituals (4 page)

"Misterr Wintrrop, therr is a lady here to see you."

A moment later she was standing in his room, which was difficult enough, because it was really too cramped for two people and she was almost two all by herself.

"I am your Aunt Therese," she said.

"You are a real Wintrop," she said.

She edged past him, briefly enveloping him in a soft, musklike scent, and looked out of the window. She did not like what she saw. Her next utterances did not so much come in a logical sequence but as a staccato run, all in the same tone. "He reads books. How small it is in here. I have heard about you. You can't turn your backside in here. My God, this place makes me feel gloomy. Has anybody ever told you about me? We'll go for a drive. I'll introduce you to someone who writes books." She said writes with such emphasis that it was clear she regarded this as an activity far superior to reading.

It was Saturday afternoon, and springtime. Later he reflected that she never asked him if he wanted to come. They simply went, or rather, she breezed down the stairs, flew through the garden as if it were a hostile element, fled into the car, and said, "We're going to see Mr Taads, Jaap."

The car tore away. She had nothing to do all day — this too had dawned on him only later — yet did it with the greatest possible speed. In his innocence he still thought that her excitement was perhaps caused by certain mysterious chemical processes somewhere in that white, slightly bloated body, as if a saucepan full of her blood was constantly on the boil on an internal stove. Blotches of different colours appeared and disappeared on the skin of her face and neck, and if she had not regularly heaved one of her big sighs, she would surely have exploded.

What was a Wintrop? he wondered, for she kept talking about that.

"All Wintrops are mad, wicked, vain, they lack discipline, they live in confusion, they are constantly getting divorced. They treat their wives like cattle and yet these women remain in love with them, they are on the wrong side in the war or they make money out of it, they are crafty in business, but they gamble their money away or throw it in the air, and they'll sell one another for a few pence. Did you ever know your father?"

She did not wait for his answer.

"You were christened, did you know that? My brother was a resistance hero, an exception in this highly principled family. The same cannot be said of your father. He had no idea how to handle money. Women, that was all he knew anything about. Do you still go to church?"

To this at least he was able to answer.

"No."

"Jaap, stop here a moment."

The white Lincoln shot up on the kerb, narrowly missing a cyclist. She looked straight at him. Blue eyes, like his. Watery but with a steel bottom. With her finger she pointed roughly to where his heart must be.

"The Wintrops are a Catholic family. A Catholic Brabant family. The only one of your father's brothers who has remained in the church is the one who has all the money. Your father, your Uncle Jos, your Uncle Noud, your Uncle Pierre, your Aunt Claire, they're all either dead or they're on their uppers. You have nothing apart from what you may get from your grandmother one day. They all left the church, chasing after some skirt. You think about that."

Within a minute they were doing over seventy again.

The trip, it turned out, took them to the village of Doom. But not only to Doom. If there existed a map of the underworld, of the world of shadows, then Doom lay at its entrance. For this drive to Doom was a drive to his family's past, to bygone names and people, to the Tilburg of the turn of the century, to woolen textiles, to agencies, to manufacturers. Her accent broadened. The Tilburg dialect must be the ugliest in the Netherlands. He listened to her tales and stored them in his mind. Later he would think about them. Later.

"Your mother was never received by us. You know why?"

"She told me." So that was what the accent reminded him of: his mother when she was agitated. So in Tilburg the common people and the bourgeoisie spoke alike.

"Do you still see her?"

"Never. She doesn't live in Europe."

Three weeks after marrying the daughter of a French business connection, his father had run off with his mother. Which the family had regarded as worse, the mortal sin or the misalliance, could not be ascertained. They had forgotten his father afterwards, but with the kind of forgetfulness whereby you forget what you have forgotten. The glove you left on a train, of which you never think again. He knew the whole story, but it had never been of any significance. A future girlfriend would say to him one day, "I was never born, I was founded", and he had recognized this. His father had been in the underworld since 1944, and his death had cut Inni out of the family twice over. He knew hardly any of his relations. He did not belong anywhere, and this suited him splendidly. He was alone. He did not know what it was, to have relations.

"Your grandfather Wintrop and my father were half-brothers. My father is your guardian."

"Was."

"He was afraid you would cost him money. We don't like that. He could get out of it quite easily, being a governor of the Child Welfare Board."

Money or God, who was to say. Inni had seen him once. A grey man in an armchair beneath his own portrait as a governor, a diamond ring on each of his little fingers — but that was all right when you were old and ugly — and a hand bell within reach ("Treezy, give my nephew a glass of port") . The story of his grandmother's money ("I shall manage it for you to the best of my ability") had not become clear to Inni, nor had it been a happy interview in other respects. Inni, pointing with thin, long hands and speaking in his sharp, northern boy's voice, had explained why God did not exist.

"We only became Catholics later. Those are the best ones. Originally we were a Protestant military family. The first Wintrop to come to Tilburg was a lieutenant colonel in the lancers. They came from the Westland."

Fables, thought Inni, lies and fables. Invented characters from an invented past. Because your own life is too dreary.

"He arrived here with the bodyguard of Willem the Second, who built the town hall and palace where he never lived, and he married a Catholic girl."

The word girl stirred him. So there had been, in other centuries, girls who had been relations of his. Invisible girls who, with girls' mouths that he had never seen, had pronounced their surname, his.

"Ever since that time the Wintrops have been in textiles. Woollens. Tweeds. Factories. Agencies."

More shadows still. People who had the right to course in his blood, to dwell in his shoulders, his hands, his eyes, his facial features, because they had procreated him.

The car sliced the landscape in two, tossing it casually backwards. It made him feel as if the life he had been leading these last few years was being flung away at the same time. His aunt remained silent for a while. He saw the blood throbbing in the blue veins of her wrists and thought
my blood,
but on his own wrists nothing was to be seen.

"Arnold Taads was once my lover," said his aunt. She started applying makeup to her face. It was not an attractive spectacle. She spread a second skin of orange-coloured pancake on top of the first, slack white skin, but she did not do it very accurately, so that narrow strips of white remained visible between the streaks of orange.

"I met him the other day for the first time since the war."

He could not conjure up any visual image of a lover of this woman, and when he saw Arnold Taads, he understood why. He could never have visualized someone who looked like that, because he had never seen anyone like him.

He was a short man, standing in the doorway of the low, white house that lay half-hidden in the woods, and was looking at his watch. He had a glass eye — the right one - and wore tall bushranger's boots and an old Red Indian jacket with long chamois fringes. This was in those long-forgotten days when people still wore suits and ties. The man's face was brown, but close beneath his conspicuous health seethed something else, a greyer, sadder element. One eye and no eye, a healthy and an unhealthy skin, a booming voice out of a grim, domineering face, a voice which had been meant for a larger body than that which housed it.

"You are ten minutes early, Therese."

At that moment an enormous dog appeared behind him and shot out into the garden.

"Athos! Come here!"

This voice was loud enough to command a battalion. The dog stood still, trembling in his skin of dark brown curly hair. Then he lowered his head and slowly went back into the house, past his master. The man himself turned and went inside. The white door fell shut behind him, softly and decisively.

"His dog, his dog," complained his aunt. "He lives for his dog."

She looked at her watch. From the house came piano music, but Inni could see nothing through the windows. It did not sound very good. Too sharp, too stiff, without lustre. Music which was intended to flow, but which instead jolted and halted, music which this person should not have been allowed to play. But who would? Someone with two glass eyes, or someone with an unhealthy, grey skin, or a small man with a soft, brown skin. Someone different.

"We'll go for a stroll," said his aunt, but he soon found that she was not up to it. On the other side of the avenue lay a wood. A scent of honeysuckle and young pine trees. His Aunt Therese kept twisting her ankles in the soft sand of the path. She bumped into trees, stumbled over a fallen branch, became entangled in a bramble bush. For the first time that afternoon he felt fear. What did it all mean? He had not asked for this. Dragged from the quiet universe of his room, hustled into a family which, admittedly, was his but for which he had never cared in the least, having a door shut in his face by a man who should really have been two people. And a chauffeur. Leaning against the preposterously big car and probably laughing, he stood watching his employer stumbling a hundred metres and then gave a soft clarion call on the horn to announce that the ten minutes were up.

*       *

Da capo. The man was standing in the doorway again. Everyone had grown ten minutes older. This has already happened, thought Inni. The same formation, the eternal Second Coming. His aunt was in front of him, a little to one side, so that the man could see him. But the man did not look. Nor did he glance at his watch this time, for everyone knew what the time was anyway. The straight grey beam of the one eye roved like a searchlight over the person of Therese Donders. Of the three men present, only the chauffeur knew that her white two-piece suit, covered with pine needles and hairy thorny twigs, was handmade by Coco Chanel.

"Hello, Therese, what a sight you look."

Only then did the man look at Inni. Perhaps it was because of that single eye that the target had a feeling of being photographed by a camera whose aim could not miss, which sucked him up, swallowed him, developed him, and then put him away for good in an archive that would cease to exist only when the camera died.

"This is a nephew of mine."

"I see. My name is Arnold Taads." The hand closed around his like a vice.

"What is his name?"

"Inni."

"Inni . . ." the man let the ridiculous name hover in the air for a moment, then flicked it away. Inni told him the origin of his name.

"In your family everyone is mad," said Arnold Taads. "Come in."

The orderliness that reigned in the room was frightening. The only form of accident was the dog, because he moved. It was, thought Inni, a room like a mathematical problem. Everything was in equilibrium, each thing fitted in with the other. A bunch of flowers, a child, a disobedient dog, or a visitor arriving ten minutes early would wreak inconceivable havoc here. All the furniture was gleaming white, of a vindictive, Calvinist modernity. The irresponsible sunlight drew geometric shadows on the linoleum. For the second time that afternoon he felt fear. What kind? As if, just for a moment, you are someone else, someone who cannot get used to being inside your body, so that it hurts.

"Sit down. Therese, you'll want a manzanilla. And what will your nephew drink?"

And then, directly to Inni, "Will you have a whisky?"

"I've never tried it," said Inni.

"Good. Then I will pour you a whisky. You will taste it carefully and then you will tell me what you think of it."

Memory. The mysterious ways thereof. For what happened in the following five minutes? First, there was literally the very first, material whisky - the glass of whisky that he would never drink again. Second, there was the man he would so often think of, later in his life, when he saw, drank, and tasted whisky. Of that man, and therefore of his aunt, and therefore of himself. In this way the whisky had become his madeleine, the handle on the trapdoor that has to be lifted for the great descent into the shadow world. And they will sit there again: the man erect, his single dreadful eye aimed straight at him, the hand which has poured the soda still on its return journey to a resting place closer to its owner. His aunt slouches, head leaning backward, eyes vacant, roving, legs stretching, opening, closing, on the too straight, too hard chair. A dolorosa. Himself he cannot see.

"Well, how does it taste?" A definition was demanded from him, a protocol his senses were required to formulate before they could be distracted by any other sensation.

"Of smoke, and of hazelnut."

Thousands of whiskys he has drunk since. Malt, bourbon, rye, the best and the worst, straight, with water, with soda, with ginger ale. And sometimes, suddenly, that sensation would come to him again. Smoke — yes, and hazelnut.

At each important moment in your life, he thought later, you ought to have an Arnold Taads, someone who asks you to describe exactly what you feel, smell, taste, and think when you experience your first fear, your first humiliation, your first woman. But the question must be asked always at the moment itself so that the protocol remains valid and the thought, the experience, can never be discoloured by later women, fears, humiliations. Precisely that definition of the first time
—
smoke and hazelnut — would set the tone for all future experiences, for they would be determined by the extent to which they either deviated from that first time, which had now become the yardstick for the future, or fell short of it, being no longer smoke or hazelnut. To see Amsterdam for the first time again, to enter the loved one with whom you have lived for years for the first time again, to hold a woman's breast in your hand for the first time again and to stroke it, and to keep the thoughts relating to this intact through the years, so that all those later times, all those other forms, cannot in due course betray, deny, cover up, that first sensation.