Rituals

by Cees Nooteboom

  Cees Nooteboom

  RITUALS

  Translated by Adrienne Dixon

  First published in the Netherlands by Uitgeverij De Arbeiderspers, 1980

  First published in English by Louisiana State University Press, 1983

  First published in Great Britain in 1996 by The Harvill Press

  Copyright © Cees Nooteboom, 1984 English translation copyright © Louisiana State University Press, 1983

  CONTENTS

  I - INTERMEZZO 1963

  II - ARNOLD TAADS 1953

  III - PHILIP TAADS 1973

  Personne n'est, au fond, plus tolérant que moi. Je vois des raisons pour soutenir toutes les opinions; ce n'est pas que les miennes ne soient fort tranchées, mais je conçois comment un homme qui a vécu dans des circonstances contraires aux miennes a aussi des idées contraires

  No one, basically, is more tolerant than I am. I can see the justification for every opinion; it is not as if I don't have a mind of my own, but I can see that a man who has lived in circumstances quite different to my own will have quite different ideas to mine

  STENDHAL "Brouillon d'article "

  I - INTERMEZZO 1963

  Und allen Plänen gegenüber begleitet mich die Frage:

  "Was soll der Unsinn?" — eine Frage, die überhaupt ganz

  und gar von mir Besitz zu nehmen droht

  And whenever I make plans I'm dogged by the question,

  "what's the point of all this nonsense?" — a question

  that threatens to take complete possession of me

  THEODOR FONTANE

  INTERMEZZO 1963

  ON THE DAY that Inni Wintrop committed suicide, Philips shares stood at 149.60. The Amsterdam Bank closing rate was 375, and Shipping Union had slipped to 141.50. Memory is like a dog that lies down where it pleases. And that was what he remembered, if he remembered anything: the market reports and that the moon shone on the canal and that he had hanged himself in the bathroom because he had predicted, in his own horoscope in Het Parool, that his wife would run off with another man and that he, a Leo, would then commit suicide. It was a perfect prediction. Zita ran off with an Italian, and Inni committed suicide. He had read a poem by Bloem, too, but he could not remember which one. The dog, arrogant beast, let him down on this point.

  Six years previously, on the eve of his marriage, he had wept, on the steps of the Palace of Justice on the same Prinsengracht, exactly such genuine tears as Zita had shed when he deflowered her in a room full of frogs and reptiles in the Valeriusstraat. And for the same reason. Dark premonitions, and an unfathomable dread of changing something, anything, in his life, if only by a mere sign or ceremony.

  He loved Zita very much. In secret, only to himself, he called her the Princess of Namibia. She did have green eyes, after all, and gleaming red hair and that dull pinkish-white complexion that goes with it — all features of the highest Namibian nobility — and she had that air of silent, reserved wonder that is regarded, in all the provinces of Namibia, as the true hallmark of the aristocracy.

  Perhaps Zita loved Inni even more. It was only because Inni did not love himself that everything had gone wrong. There were, of course, people who claimed that it was because they both had such ridiculous names, but both Inni (Inigo, after the famous English architect) and Zita (the mother of the Namibian Princess was a supporter of the House of Habsburg) knew that the strange sounds making up their names lifted them above, and isolated them from, the rest of the world. They could spend hours in bed saying Inni Inni, Zita Zita, and on special occasions also velvety variants - Zinnies, Itas, Inizitas, Zinnininitas, Itizitas — couplings of names and bodies that at such moments they would have wished to continue forever. But as no greater enmity exists than that between time in its entirety and each random, separate particle of time, there was no chance of that.

  Inni Wintrop, fairly bald now but at that time blessed with springy, gold-coloured hair that was long for those days, distinguished himself from many of his contemporaries by having difficulty in spending the night alone, by possessing a bit of money, and by sometimes having visions. For the rest he dealt in painting on occasion, wrote a horoscope for Het Parool, knew a great many poems by heart, and closely followed the stock and commodity markets. Political convictions, of whatever colour, he regarded as more or less mild forms of mental illness, and he had reserved the role of dilettante, in the Italian sense of the word, for himself.

  All this, seen as so many contradictions by those around him, was experienced in Amsterdam with increasing pain as the Sixties began to unfold. "Inni lives in two worlds", said his friends, of all kinds and conditions, who themselves lived each in only one world. But Inni, who was ready to hate himself at any moment of the day, on request if need be, made an exception at this point. If he had ever had any ambition, he would have been prepared to call himself a failure, but he had none. He regarded life as a rather odd club of which he had accidentally become a member and from which one could be expelled without reasons having to be supplied. He had already decided to leave the club if the meetings should become all too boring.

  * *

  But how boring is boring? Often it seemed that the moment had arrived. Inni would lie on the floor for days, his head pressed into the tormenting ribs of the Chinese rush mat, so that Fontana-like patterns appeared in his fairly soft skin. Wallowing, Zita called it, but she realized that it was genuine sorrow rising from deep and invisible springs, and on such sombre days she looked after Inni as best she could. Usually the wallowing ended with a vision. Inni would then rise from the torments of the mat, beckon to Zita, and describe the apparitions he had just seen and what these had said to him.

  Years had passed since the night in which Inni had wept on the steps of the Palace of Justice. Zita and Inni had eaten, drunk, and travelled. Inni had lost money dealing in nickel, made a profit in watercolours of the Hague school, and written horoscopes and recipes for Elegance. Zita had almost had a child, but on that occasion Inni had been unable to keep his fear of change under control and had given orders to prevent its entrance into a world for which, after all, he himself did not care much either. In so doing, he had put his signature under the biggest change of all, that Zita would leave him. Inni noticed only the first foreshadowings: her skin became drier, her eyes did not always look at him, she uttered his name less often. But he associated these signs only with her fate, not his.

  It is a peculiarity of time that in retrospect it appears so compact, an indivisible solid object, a dish with only one smell and one flavour. Inni, familiar with the idiom of modern poetry, was fond of describing himself in those days as "a hole", an absence, a nonexistent. Unlike the poets, he did not mean anything specific by this. It was more a social comment on the fact that he was able to mix with the most diverse kinds of people. A hole, a chameleon, a being that could be given content, complete with attitude and accent — it was all the same to him, and Amsterdam offered every opportunity for mimicry. "You don't live," his friend the writer had once said to him, "you allow yourself to be distracted," and Inni had regarded this as a compliment. He thought he played his part equally well in a working-class bar and at a shareholders' meeting. Only his hairstyle and clothes posed a problem on occasion, but in the days when all Amsterdam became chameleon like, when modes of dress proclaimed the anticipated classless society and it no longer mattered who wore what and when, Inni enjoyed the happiest time of his life, insofar as in his life there could be question of that.

  Not so Zita. Even the limitless reserves of Namibia will become exhausted. There are women who are so faithful that nothing but a once-only unfaithfulness can save them from certain catastrophe. Inni might perhaps have been able to recognize this, but somewhere in the indivisible lump of never-to-be-recaptured time he had c
eased to pay attention to Zita. What was worse, he made love to her more and more often, heedless of all the omens, so that Zita gradually withdrew her love from this ever stranger man who, while exciting, caressing, and licking her, while bringing her off, would fail to notice her for days on end. Inni and Zita thus became two perfect lust machines, attractive to the eye, ornaments to the city, dream apparitions at the parties of Haffy Keizer and Dick Holthaus. When she was alone, Zita would sometimes linger by a window display of baby clothes. She would shudder with hidden revenge, usually at moments — only the great platonic computer that registers everything could observe this — while somewhere in a squalid room in some European capital Inni was having himself rubbed up by a whore or a teenager in jeans, or was making a killing at some gaming table by calling out banco six times in succession. To the cautiously advancing Mediterranean man who was attracted by the rapacious look on the white face in its frame of red hair reflected in the window of the baby store, Zita paid no attention. Her time had not yet come.

  It was Amsterdam before the Provos, before the "dwarfs", before the long, hot summers. But at many places in that magic semicircle, unrest was sharpening. It seemed an age ago since the Indies had slipped away into one of those last pages of the Dutch history book that later would have to be rewritten so drastically. Korea had been divided with a ruler, by what some called the ineluctable course of history, and there were already people who knew that the seed of Vietnam had been sown. Fishes were beginning to die of things that fishes had not died of in the past, and the faces in the ever lengthening traffic jams along the canals displayed at times that mixture of frustration and aggression that was to make the Seventies so special. But as yet hardly anyone seemed to know that Nature, the mother of all, would soon waste away and that the end of our polluted era was at hand, for good.

  And yet, under all this outward ignorance brewed the soft ferment of unrest, despair, and malice. The world had smelled foul for a long time and Amsterdam was beginning to smoulder, but everyone blamed it on his own bad temper, worries, escapeless marriage, or lack of money. The great relief, that the disease was primarily that of the world and only secondarily of individual people, had not yet been offered by anyone.

  "Ever gloomier, ever more awake" was Inni's device in those days. It was never quite clear when it was night for him, but he always woke up in the middle and then he died — at least, that was what he called it. It is well known that if a dying person has a moment to spare, however brief, he sees his life pass before him in a flash. This happened nightly to Inni, except that being scarcely able to remember his life up to the day his Aunt Therese had appeared, all he saw was a grey film with an occasional sequence in which he, small or a little bigger, figured in brief, abrupt scenes. These were mostly unconnected incidents or lengthy stills of objects that for some inexplicable reason had been left behind in the empty attic of his memory, such as an egg on a plate in Tilburg or the enormous purple penis of a chance neighbour in a urinal at the Schenkkade in The Hague.

  How it was that he could remember poems by heart was a mystery to him, and he often reflected that perhaps he would have done better to learn his life by heart so that in these recurring nocturnal last moments he could at least have watched an orderly film instead of all those loose fragments without the cohesion you might have expected of a life just ended. Perhaps the daily death was so immensely sad because no one was really dying at all. There was only a number of barely connected snapshots at which nobody would ever look. This unchangingly and relentlessly identical, meaningless cycle never bothered him during the daytime, because this kind of death did not really belong to that life. He was careful, therefore, not to talk of it with Zita or with anyone else. Zita slept a prehistoric, Namibian sleep, and when the hour of nocturnal suffering arrived, he detached himself from her total embrace, went to a different room, and wept bitterly though briefly. When he later climbed back into bed, her arms opened as if they saw him, but much more seemed to open — a whole Elysian world full of warm, soft meadows in which the hay had just been gathered and where all the Innis of the world were put to sleep.

  * *

  His own lack of memory must have spread to other people, too. Otherwise it was inexplicable, thought Inni, that no one, but no one, was able to tell him later what kind of summer it had been in 1963. Summers, all of them, invariably reminded him of the woods around Arnold Taads's house near Doom on a hot day: everything slightly hazy, sultry, there would be a thunderstorm soon, the lakes were black and dead silent and willing to reflect anything and everything, the ducks lay comatose in the reeds, on the roof of a country house a peacock screamed his cry of despair, and perhaps the universe was about to perish at last. Already there was a slight odour of decay, because nature itself wallowed. Inni did not have to do anything. That was what summers were like, and therefore also the summer of 1963, until someone checked up for him in old newspaper ledgers and told him that in 1963 it had rained constantly. He did remember, but it had been engraved on his mind that in that year he had fallen in love with a barmaid from the Voetboogsteeg and that an Italian migrant worker, employed in the kitchen of the Victoria Hotel but a photographer in his spare time, had taken a photograph of Zita for Taboo, a magazine that would last a mere two issues, just long enough to put an end to Inni and Zita's happiness. For whatever it was — the long wear and tear, the painstaking mutual consummation as if it were a perpetual meal, all those long Amsterdam nights of body migrations and sudden visions destined for an empty film reel — all of this together constituted happiness, and it was about to disappear, and it would never come back. Never.

  * *

  The Voetboogsteeg bar was long and dark, designed for customers of the Exchange and provincials, low characters too craven to go to the whores and too stingy to keep a mistress. Instead, they came to the divine twilight in this tartan décor bar to peer into Lyda's vast white bosom, a pleasure that had to be paid for with a never-ending stream of creme-de-menthe sodas. That had been the reason he fell in love, that slow river of green liquid disappearing into her wide mouth. That and the silver-grey sprayed, ludicrously tall hairdo, and those large white breasts of which so much and yet too little was visible, and the fact that she was more than a head taller than Inni. "I am all green inside," she used to say periodically, and that, too, excited him.

  Since the first, real Lyda, who was not called Lyda but Petra, there had been many Lydas in Inni's life, and because he was not a consistent philosopher, he had several explanations for this. Sometimes it really had something to do with love, but at other times it happened that he regarded himself as a vampire who could live only if he could suck "light" out of women, passersby, or as he put it, undefined feminine beings of the female sex. These brief mountings, these exchanges, these mutual ministrations of almost nameless services, gave him temporarily the feeling that he existed after all. Not that he always found this agreeable. But sometimes, when time seemed never-ending, when the days confused him by their unimaginable duration, when it seemed as if there would always be more hours and minutes than water and air, he would go out into the street like a dog, simply disguising himself as someone in search of sex; and in the evening he would hide himself deeper than ever in Zita's arms. But there were also other times, days in which the hunter allowed himself to be hunted, times when objects were not so emphatically present and when he did not immediately, on seeing a car, think car, when the days did not hang around him like empty, never-to-be-filled vessels. At such times he was ecstatic. He would walk about the city as if he could fly, and abandon himself to anyone laying claim to a brief possession of Inni Wintrop.

  Zita had no part in all this. He had decided that insofar as the world existed, and therefore he, too, he would have to obey Zita's code, which was a simple one: whatever he did, she did not want to know about it, since otherwise she would be obliged to kill him, and that would be of no benefit to anyone.

  Suddenly, in the year we are talking of, it became Nov
ember. Inni sold a small plot of land still left from his inheritance from his guardian, dined with the estate agent in the Oyster Bar, took Zita to a friend in Amsterdam South, and then offered Lyda a creme de menthe. "I'm seeing you home tonight," he said, deciding that this was a proper Amsterdam approach. "Are you now," she said, cocking her head like a parrot that wants to hear that same funny noise again. She took another sip, and as he saw the green liquid slithering in, Inni felt a slow excitement rising up from his toes.

  Lyda lived in West. After the menthe, there had been the equally unending staircase to her attic, which had excited him immensely, and finally the room itself with the cane chair, the Nescafe, the marigolds, the coconut mat, and the framed portrait of her father, a bald Lyda, looking down suspiciously from the realm of the dead into the room, to see whom she had brought home this time. Inni found it touching, the nakedness of someone he had never seen naked before. The fact that you could, with a few moves of the hand, somewhere in a wooden bird's nest on some floor or other in a nameless neighbourhood, reduce a fully dressed, upright-walking stranger to the most natural state, that the person who a few moments earlier had been sitting in an espresso bar leafing through Elsevier was now lying naked beside you in a bed that had never existed before, though it had been in existence for years - if there was anything that could ward off death, blindness, and cancer, this was it.

  Lyda was large and white and soft and full, and after the predictable course of events during which she had called out for her mother, the two of them looked like a failed attempt at flying, something sweaty that had crashed. Both of them were covered in a silvery layer of lacquer from her hair, which, after they had unpinned the candy-floss web, hung down to her hips. They lay still for a time. In accordance with the rules, Inni was sad. As he let the embrace with the bigger Lyda seep away into his memory gap, he felt, as usual, bitter at what was bound to happen next. They would disentangle themselves, maybe wash, he would descend the long staircase like someone descending a staircase, she would fall asleep in her own nest, tomorrow she would drink creme de menthe again, with idiots, and they would die, each one separately, in different hospital beds, ill treated by young nurses who were not yet born.