The Rings of Saturn (7 page)

Recalling the uncertainty I then felt brings me back to the Argentinian tale I have referred to before, a tale which deals with our attempts to invent secondary or tertiary worlds. The narrator describes dining with Adolfo Bioy Casares in a house in Calle Gaona in Ramos Mejìa one evening in 1935. He relates that after dinner they had a long and rambling talk about the writing of a novel that would fly in the face of palpable facts and become
entangled in contradictions in such a way that few readers – very few readers – would be able to grasp the hidden, horrific, yet at the same time quite meaningless point of the narrative. At the end of the passage that led to the room where we were sitting, the author continues, hung an oval, half-fogged mirror that had a somewhat disquieting effect. We felt that this dumb witness was keeping a watch on us, and thus we discovered – discoveries of this kind are almost always made in the dead of night – that there is something sinister about mirrors. Bioy Casares then recalled the observation of one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar, that the disturbing thing about mirrors, and also the act of copulation, is that they multiply the number of human beings. I asked Bioy Casares for the source of this memorable remark, the author writes, and he told me that it was in the entry on Uqbar in the
Anglo-American Cyclopaedia.
As the story goes on, however, it is revealed that this entry is nowhere to be found in the encyclopaedia in question, or rather, it appears uniquely in the copy bought years earlier by Bioy Casares, the twenty-sixth volume of which contains four pages that are not in any other copy of the edition in question, that of 1917. It thus remains unclear whether Uqbar ever existed or whether the description of this unknown country might not be a case similar to that of Tlön, the encyclopaedists' project to which the main portion of the narrative in question is devoted and which aimed at creating a new reality, in the course of time, by way of the unreal. The labyrinthine construction of Tlön, reads a note added to the text in 1947, is on the point of blotting out the known world. The language of Tlön, which hitherto no one had mastered, has now invaded the
academies; already the history of Tlön has superseded all that we formerly knew or thought we knew; in historiography, the indisputable advantages of a fictitious past have become apparent. Almost every branch of learning has been reformed. A ramified dynasty of hermits, the dynasty of the Tlön inventors, encyclopaedists and lexicographers, has changed the face of the earth. Every language, even Spanish, French and English, will disappear from the planet. The world will be Tlön. But, the narrator concludes, what is that to me? In the peace and quiet of my country villa I continue to hone my tentative translation, schooled on Quevedo, of Thomas Browne's
Urn Burial
(which I do not mean to publish).

IV

T
he rain clouds had dispersed when, after dinner, I rook my first walk around the streets and lanes of the town. Darkness was falling, and only the lighthouse with its shining glass cabin still caught the last luminous rays that came in from the western horizon.

Footsore and weary as I was after my long walk from Lowestoft, I sat down on a bench on the green called Gunhill and looked out on the tranquil sea, from the depths of which the shadows were now rising. Everyone who had been out for an evening stroll was gone. I felt as if I were in a deserted theatre, and I should not have been surprised if a curtain had suddenly risen before me and on the proscenium I had beheld, say, the 28th of May 1672 – that memorable day when the Dutch fleet appeared offshore from out of the drifting mists, with the bright morning light behind it, and opened fire on the English ships in Sole Bay. In all likelihood the people of Southwold hurried out of the town as soon as the first cannonades were fired to watch the rare spectacle from the beach. Shading their eyes with their hands against the dazzling sun, they would have watched the ships moving hither and thither, apparently at random, their sails billowing in a light north-east wind and then, as they manoeuvred ponderously, flapping once again. They would not have been able to make out human figures at that distance, not even the gentlemen of the Dutch and English admiralties on the bridges. As the battle continued, the powder magazines exploded, and some of the tarred hulls burned down to the waterline; the scene would have been shrouded in an acrid, yellowish-black smoke creeping across the entire bay and masking the combat from view. While most of the accounts of the battles fought on the so-called fields of honour have from time immemorial been unreliable, the pictorial representations of great naval engagements are without exception figments of the imagination. Even celebrated painters such as Storck, van der Velde or de Loutherbourg, some of whose versions of the
Battle of Sole Bay I studied closely in the Maritime Museum in Greenwich, fail to convey any true impression of how it must have been to be on board one of these ships, already overloaded with equipment and men, when burning masts and sails began to fall or cannonballs smashed into the appallingly overcrowded decks.

On the Royal James alone, which was set aflame by a fireship, nearly half the thousand-strong crew perished. No details of the end of the three-master have come down to us. There were eye-witnesses who claimed to have seen the commander of the English fleet, the Earl of Sandwich, who weighed almost twenty-four stone, gesticulating on the afterdeck as the flames encircled him. All we know for certain is that his bloated body was washed up on the beach near Harwich a few weeks later. The seams of his uniform had burst asunder, the buttonholes were torn open, yet the Order of the Garter still gleamed in undiminished splendour.
At that date there can have been only a few cities on earth that numbered as many souls as were annihilated in sea-battles of this kind. The agony that was endured and the enormity of the havoc wrought defeat our powers of comprehension, just as we cannot conceive the vastness of the effort that must have been required – from felling and preparing the timber, mining and smelting the ore, and forging the iron, to weaving and sewing the sailcloth – to build and equip vessels that were almost all predestined for destruction. For a brief time only these curious creatures sailed the seas, moved by the winds that circle the earth, bearing names such as Stavoren, Resolution, Victory, Groot Hollandia and Olyfan, and then they were gone. It has never been determined, which of the two parties in the naval battle fought off Southwold to extort trading advantages emerged victorious. It is certain, however, that the decline of the Netherlands began here, with a shift in the balance of power so small that it was out of proportion to the human and material resources expended in the battle; while on the other hand the English government, almost bankrupt, diplomatically isolated, and humiliated by the Dutch raid on Chatham, was now able, despite a complete absence of strategic thinking and a naval administration on the verge of disintegration, and thanks only to the vagaries of the wind and the waves that day, to commence the sovereignty at sea that was to be unbroken for so long. – As I sat there that evening in Southwold overlooking the German Ocean, I sensed quite clearly the earth's slow turning into the dark. The huntsmen are up in America, writes Thomas Browne in
The Garden of Cyrus,
and they are already past their first sleep in Persia. The shadow of night is drawn like a black veil across the
earth, and since almost all creatures, from one meridian to the next, lie down after the sun has set, so, he continues, one might, in following the setting sun, see on our globe nothing but prone bodies, row upon row, as if levelled by the scythe of Saturn – an endless graveyard for a humanity struck by falling sickness. I gazed farther and farther out to sea, to where the darkness was thickest and where there extended a cloudbank of the most curious shape, which I could barely make out any longer, the rearward view, I presume, of the storm that had broken over Southwold in the late afternoon. For a while, the topmost summit regions of this massif, dark as ink, glistened like the icefields of the Caucasus, and as I watched the glare fade I remembered that years before, in a dream, I had once walked the entire length of a mountain range just as remote and just as unfamiliar. It must have been a distance of a thousand miles or more, through ravines, gorges and valleys, across ridges, slopes and drifts, along the edges of great forests, over wastes of rock, shale and snow. And I recalled that in my dream, once I had reached the end of my journey, I looked back, and that it was six o'clock in the evening. The jagged peaks of the mountains I had left behind rose in almost fearful silhouette against a turquoise sky in which two or three pink clouds drifted. It was a scene that felt familiar in an inexplicable way, and for weeks it was on my mind until at length I realized that, down to the last detail, it matched the Vallüla massif, which I had seen from the bus, through eyes drooping with tiredness, a day or so before I started school, as we returned home from an outing to the Montafon. I suppose it is submerged memories that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps
there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulphur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of theatre is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience?

Just as these things have always been beyond my understanding, so too I found it impossible to believe, as I sat on Gunhill in Southwold that evening, that just one year earlier I had been looking across to England from a beach in Holland. On that occasion, following a bad night spent at Baden in Switzerland, I had travelled via Basle and Amsterdam to The Hague, where I had taken a room in one of the less salubrious hotels near the station. I no longer remember whether it was the Lord Asquith, the Aristo, or the Fabiola. At all events, in the lobby of this establishment, which would deeply have depressed even the humblest of travellers, there sat two gentlemen, no longer in their first youth, who must have been partners for a long time; and between them, in the stead of a child, as it were, was an apricot-coloured poodle. After I had rested a little in the room I was allotted, I went for a stroll, looking for a bite to eat, up the road that runs from the station to the city centre, past the Bristol Bar, Yuksel's Café, a video library, Aran Turk's pizza place, a Euro-sex-shop, a halal butcher's, and a carpet store, above whose display a rudimentary fresco in four parts showed a caravan crossing the desert. The name Perzenpaleis was lettered in red on the façade of the run-down building, the upper-storey windows of which were all white-washed over.

As I was looking up at this façade, a man with a dark beard, wearing a suit jacket over a long tunic, slipped past me through a doorway, so close that our elbows touched. Through that doorway, for an unforgettable moment that seemed to exist outside time, I glimpsed the wooden rack on which perhaps a hundred pairs of well-worn shoes had been placed beside and above one another. Only later did I see the minaret rising from the courtyard of the building into the azure Dutch evening sky. For an hour or more I walked around this somehow extraterritorial part of town. Most of the windows in the side streets were boarded up, and slogans like Help de regenwouden redden or Welcome to the Royal Dutch Graveyard were graffiti'd on the sooty brick walls. No longer able to decide on a place to eat, I bought a carton of chips at McDonald's, where I felt like a criminal wanted worldwide as I stood at the brightly lit counter, and ate them as I walked back to my hotel. Outside the entrances of the entertainment and dining establishments on the road to the station, small groups of oriental men had now gathered, most of them
smoking in silence while the odd one appeared to be doing a deal with a client. When I reached the little canal that crosses the road, an open-top American limousine studded with lights and gleaming with chrome glided past me across the carriageway as if it had come out of nowhere, and in it sat a pimp in a white suit, wearing gold-framed sunglasses and on his head a ludicrous Tyrolean hat. And as I stood gazing in amazement after this almost supernatural apparition, a dark-skinned man shot round the corner towards me, sheer terror in his face, and, swerving to avoid me, left me full in the path of his pursuer, who, judging by appearances, was a countryman of his. This pursuer, whose eyes were shining with rage and blood lust, was probably a chef or kitchen porter, since he was wearing an apron and holding a long, glinting knife in one hand, which passed by me so close that I imagined I felt it piercing between my ribs. Disturbed by the impression this experience made on me, I lay on my bed in my hotel room. I did not have a good night. It was so oppressive and sultry that one could not leave the windows closed; but if one opened them, one heard the din of traffic from the crossroads and every few minutes the dreadful squeal of the tram as it ground round the terminus track-loop. I was therefore not in the best of states next morning at the Mauritshuis when I stood before the large group portrait,
The Anatomy Lesson.
Although I had gone to The Hague especially to see this painting, which would continue to occupy me considerably over the years to come, I was so out of sorts after my bad night that I was quite unable to harness my thoughts as I looked at the body being dissected under the eyes of the Guild of Surgeons. Indeed, without knowing why, I was so affected by the painting that later it took me a full hour
to recover, in front of Jacob van Ruisdael's
View of Haarlem with Bleaching Fields.
The flatland stretching out towards Haarlem is seen from above, from a vantage point generally identified as the dunes, though the sense of a bird's-eye view is so strong that the dunes would have to be veritable hills or even modest mountains. The truth is of course that Ruisdael did not take up a position on the dunes in order to paint; his vantage point was an imaginary position some distance above the earth. Only in this way could he see it all together: the vast cloudscape that occupies two thirds of the picture; the town, which is little more than a fraying of the horizon, except for St Bavo's cathedral, which towers above all the other buildings; the dark basks and bushes; the farm in the foreground; and the bright field where the sheets of white linen have been laid out to bleach and where, by my count, seven or eight people no taller than a quarter of an inch are going about their work. After I left the gallery, I sat for a while on the sunlit steps of the palais which Governor Johann Maurits, as the guidebook I had bought informed me, had built in his homeland whilst he was in Brazil for seven years, and fitted out as a cosmographic residence reflecting the wonders of the remotest regions of the earth, in keeping with his personal motto: “Even unto the limits of our world”. Report has it that when the house was opened in May 1644, three hundred years before I was born, eleven Indians the Governor had brought with him from Brazil performed a dance on the cobbled square in front of the new building, conveying to the townspeople some sense of the foreign lands to which the power of their community now extended. These dancers, about whom nothing else is known, have long since disappeared, as soundless as shadows, as silent as the heron I saw
when I set off once more, flying just above the shining surface of the water, the beat of its wings calm and even, undisturbed by the traffic creeping along the bank of the Hofvijver. Who can say how things were in ages past? Diderot, in one of his travel journals, described Holland as the Egypt of Europe, where one might cross the fields in a boat and, as far as the eye could see, there would be scarcely anything to break the flooded surface of the plain. In that curious country, he wrote, the most modest rise gave one the loftiest sensation. And for Diderot there was nothing more satisfying to the human mind than the neat Dutch towns with their straight, tree-lined canals, exemplary in every respect. Settlement succeeded settlement just as if they had been conjured up overnight by the hand of an artist in accordance with some carefully worked-out plan, wrote Diderot, and even in the heart of the largest of them one still felt one was out in the country. The Hague, at that time with a population of about forty thousand, he felt was the loveliest village on earth, and the road from the town to the strand at Scheveningen a promenade without equal. It was not easy to appreciate these observations as I walked along Parkstraat towards Scheveningen. Here and there stood a fine villa in its garden, but otherwise there was nothing to afford me any respite. Perhaps I had gone the wrong way, as so often in unfamiliar cities. In Scheveningen, where I had hoped to be able to see the sea from a distance, I walked for a long time in the shadow of tall apartment blocks, as if at the bottom of a ravine. When at last I reached the beach I was so tired that I lay down and slept till the afternoon. I heard the surge of the sea, and, half dreaming, understood every word of Dutch and for the first time in my life believed I had arrived,
and was home. Even when I awoke it seemed to me for a moment that my people were resting all around me as we made our way across the desert. The façade of the Kurhaus towered above me like a great caravanserai, a comparison which sat well with the fact