Rituals (5 page)

Arnold Taads had at least set a standard for him on one sensuous experience. All the others would vanish irrevocably in later layers of his memory, interblended and corrupted in the way that his hand, which had caressed that first breast and closed those first dead eyes, had betrayed his memory, himself, and that first breast by having become older and misshapen. It was a hand showing the first brown freckles of old age, with thick veins, a corrupted, tainted, experienced forty-five-year-old hand, an early harbinger of death in which that former, slenderer, whiter hand had dissolved unrecognizably, unfindably, while he still called it "my hand", and would continue to do so until a later, living hand would lay it, dead, on his breast, crossed over the other that resembled it.

"What do you do?" asked Arnold Taads.

"I work in an office."

"Why?" This belonged to the class of superfluous questions.

"To earn money."

"Why aren't you a student?"

"I haven't got a high school diploma. I was expelled from school." He had been expelled from four schools, but it did not seem the right moment to divulge this. The eye, which had been fixed on him uninterruptedly, now moved without the head in which it was lodged turning with it, like a searchlight to his aunt, so that Inni was free to let his gaze wander about the room. On the mantelpiece lay twenty packets of cigarettes all of the same brand, Black Beauty. Beside them stood a number of silver and gold medals on a stand, each representing a skier.

"What are those medals?" asked Inni.

"We're talking about you now. Don't forget, I used to be a notary. I always finish things properly. What do you want to be in life?"

"I don't know."

He realized that this was not a good answer, but it was the only possible one, even to someone who liked to finish things properly. He had not the faintest idea. As a matter of fact, he was sure that not only did he never want to be anything but that he never would be anything either. The world was already chock-f of people who were something, and most of them were clearly not happy with what they were.

"Do you want to stay in that office then?"

"No."

Office! An upstairs room in a residential area, with a madman on the ground floor who thought he was the director of something and who needed him to be his staff. The man bought and sold something, and Inni wrote the letters to and from. Letters of air, business without substance. Usually he spent the day reading, looking out over the back garden, or thinking of distant journeys — without much yearning, for he knew he would make them anyway some time. It was an existence which would stop all by itself one day, and perhaps this was that day.

"Don't your parents give you any money?"

"My mother hasn't got any and my . . . my stepfather doesn't give me any."

*       *

Smoke and hazelnut. What do you want to be? On that afternoon his life had begun, and he had never become anything. He had done things, certainly. Travelled, written horoscopes, sold paintings. Later, with that glass of whisky in his hand still recurring in the realm of his memory, he thought that that was precisely it: his life had consisted of incidents, but these were not coordinated into any kind of idea about his life. There was no central thought, such as a career, an ambition. He simply existed, a son without a father and a father without a son, and things just happened. In fact, his life consisted in manufacturing memories, and it was therefore all the more regrettable that he had such a bad memory, because this made his already fairly long voyage even longer; all those empty gaps gave it an almost unbearable slowness sometimes. So he told his friend the writer that his life was a meditation. Was it because of the glass of whisky or because on that afternoon he had become a Wintrop financially that he regarded his life as having started on that day, and all that had gone before as a preamble, as half-dark prehistory into which only excavations could provide any insight at all, assuming anyone wanted to bother?

"Therese, why don't you give the boy some money? Your family took everything away from his father."

The red blotches multiplied. It had begun as a whim, an attack of family-mania inspired by boredom, this visit to the unknown nephew who looked as if he might be something special, who had contradicted her father. He now sat here with a face like many of the others wandering about the pages of her photo album, though probably with a personality different from most. He was not free from arrogance or from melancholy; he was articulate but clearly without ambition; and he was doubtlessly lazy, intelligent, mocking, and constantly observing. And now, her whim must be translated into hard matter, and to be precise, into the kind of matter from which the Wintrops were least happy to part — money.

"I would have to see if I can raise anything," she said. "You know what it's like with these things."

But it had been a commanding voice that had laid down the law, the same voice that would say, as soon as she had gone, "She is a stupid woman, and she pesters me, which is what I can't stand."

She readjusted something invisible in her lap and overturned an imaginary vase, actions that froze when Arnold Taads's voice continued: "I shall think of a fair arrangement. One doesn't let people of one's own kind waste their time in offices."

"Will you come to Goirle with him then, next weekend?"

"You know I hate going there and that I find your husband's company hard to bear, but yes, I will come. I shall bring Athos with me, but on no account will I go to church. If you send the car, we shall be ready to leave at eleven o'clock on Saturday."

The eye sought Inni.

"And you hand in your notice, because that job of yours is pointless, that is obvious. You should spend a year reading or travelling. You are not suited to be a subordinate."

Sub-or-di-nate. A word of four syllables was indeed given, by this voice, four individually wrapped, separate doses of emphasis. Not a single word, thought Inni, of what the man had said during the afternoon had yet vanished from the room. Like objects they were stacked away somewhere among the furniture. There was no escape any more.

"Well, Therese, it is nearly five o'clock. My reading hour. Your nephew can stay for dinner here if he wants to. I'll see you on Saturday. Tell your chauffeur to be on time."

She rushed out of the room. He saw her flying down the garden path and heard the car moving off fast. He wiped away the wetness her fleeting kiss had left on his cheek. Arnold Taads returned to the room. Somewhere in the house a clock struck five. He picked up a book and said: "I read until a quarter to six. Amuse yourself."

An iron silence settled on the bungalow. Inni knew exactly what kind of silence it was, for he had heard it before, in a Trappist monastery. The knock on the door, the shuffling, the smothered rustle of heavy cloth in the corridors, the footsteps, soft as if in snow. Then the entrance into the chapel, the dry wooden tap starting a half hour of communal meditation. Spellbound, he had looked down from the visitors' gallery onto the white, immobile figures in the cold, tall choir stalls below. Old men, young men, chewing on some thought or other, forever inaccessible to him. On one occasion he had seen one of the men fall asleep, slowly toppling forward like a piece of wood. Another dry tap had sounded, stone on wood. The man, startled from his stupor, had scrambled to his feet and come forward on the black-and-white checkered stone floor between the rows of choir stalls, bowed, but
bowed,
broke in two before the abbot, who wordlessly, with a sign, dealt him his punishment — prostration. The long, white figure fell to the ground like a dead swan, his hands as far from his feet as possible, a flattened, humiliated being, stretched out full length. And not one of all those men had looked up. Only the tap of stone on wood, the abbot's ring, a few footsteps, the rustle of clothes had broken the silence.

Now he was again in a monastery, the monastery of one man, his own monk and his own abbot.

Inni needed to go to the bathroom, but dared not move. Or would the man, on the contrary, despise him if he sat here all the time like a dummy, without doing anything? Slowly and very quietly he got up, walked past the reading man, who did not look up - on the cover he saw existentialism . . . humanism — towards the piano — Schubert . . . impromptu — and from there out into the corridor. In the bathroom he found a copy of the
Haagse Post,
which he took back to the living room. He turned the loose pages as if they must not displace any air and read the anecdotes he would be reading all his life. After the Iranian rebellion Egypt was at the top of the list of sensitive trouble spots for the West.
Pravda,
in a long fierce article, attacked the Bermuda Conference, which President Eisenhower had convened to discuss whether one ought to talk with the Kremlin, as Sir Winston favoured, or stand firm, as President Eisenhower recommended. The French president Vincent Auriol had asked Paul Reynaud to form a new government. History.

How many names would have to settle inside him, flow through him, until that whole, constantly self-destroying and self-regenerating tribe would at last leave him totally indifferent. They bore the faces of the fate of their day, which they were deluded enough to think they determined, but they themselves were at the same time the blind masks of a force that swept across the world. You should not take too much notice of them, that was all. But what was called "governing", the inadmissible desire to be the executor of fate, the temporary face of that most mysterious of all monsters, the state, seemed to him later, much later, despicable.

At exactly a quarter to six the dog lifted its head and Arnold Taads put down his book.

"Athos! Come for a walk!"

They left the house and entered the vaulted, dark shade of the wood. The host soon diverged from the path that had caused his former mistress such trouble and turned into a small side track. But with Taads, there was no question of stumbling or falling. Inni had difficulty in keeping up with the bushranger's jacket in front of him. The dog, on the other hand, seemed to know exactly where the walk led. His presence had become invisible and could only be deduced from the quick riffle of dead leaves somewhere ahead. "Sartre," said the grey wavy hair, the smallish skull, the chamois jacket, the corduroy trousers, and the Russia-leather boots in front of him, "Sartre says we should draw the ultimate conclusion from the fact that God does not exist. Do you believe in God?"

"No," Inni called out. After all, the man had said that on their impending visit to his aunt he did not want to go to church.

"Since when don't you?" asked the pine trees and the bramble bushes.

He knew exactly when it had been, but whether he would say so he did not know. It had had something to do with wine and blood, real wine and real blood, and you just try to explain that.

The best thing would, of course, be to say that the little faith he had ever possessed had simply poured out of him like oil out of a defective engine. Up to the age of twelve his upbringing had hardly been Catholic, after all. The humiliating seed of which others have to bear the excessive growth had been sown too late for it to take root properly. He had been christened, but his parents could not marry in church because his father was divorced. A later marriage of his mother to a devout Catholic had brought him face to face with this religion, but only its theatrical, external aspects had fascinated him. The singing, the incense, and the colours had appealed to him so much that he would not have minded entering the monastery even without believing.

Another thing that attracted him about the Catholic faith was that others
did
believe in it. At boarding school he had served as altar boy every morning at six o'clock for the half-demented Father Romualdus, who was too old to teach and was only allowed to do a bit of surveillance. To the belching old man at the altar it really was true that when he whispered
Hic est enim Calix Sanguinis mei,
the small measure of red wine changed into blood, became blood,
mysterium fidei —
the blood, at that, of someone who had been dead for almost two thousand years and which the old, brocade-clad man in front of him, who had to hold on to the edge of the altar, would presently drink "in remembrance of Me". It was blood of which Inni would help remove the last traces by pouring a cruet of water into the gold chalice raised to him by trembling, speckled old hands and in which a few drops of divine blood, human blood, had remained behind. Inni had found this unspeakably mysterious, but that was no reason to believe in it. If the man with whom he busied himself on those dark cold mornings and who moved this way and that in front of the little slaughter table like a gold-stitched toad believed in it, then it was true, even if only in that half-softened brain which at times tended to muddle up the Latin phrases in ways so unacceptable that Inni, in his sharp boy's voice, had to lead the speaker back to theologically more correct sequences.

But it was not only that. It was also the notion of sacrifice, of offering. There they were, totally unobserved in their strange twosomeness of sixteen and well over eighty, busy with mysterious, antique rituals that gave Inni a feeling of sinking far back into time. He felt that he was no longer imprisoned in this wretched neo-Gothic squalor but that he had arrived in the landscapes of ancient Greece, the world of Homer, whose secrets they unravelled every day in class, or at the sacrificial offering of live animals by the Jews to the God with the terrible voice who resided above the scorching deserts. This was the God of Vengeance, the God of the Burning Bush and the wife of Lot, a God who, thought Inni, was surrounded by a cosmos of emptiness and fear and punishment for those who believed in him. What they were doing there, Father Romualdus and he, had to do with the Minotaur, with divine offerings and mysteries, with the Sibyls, with fate and destiny. It was a very small bullfight for two men, from which the bull was absent yet had a wound from which the blood was being drunk — a mystery accompanied by low whisperings in Latin.