Rituals

by Cees Nooteboom

  * *

  He groped behind him on the floor where, before getting into bed, he had seen a packet of Caballeros. As he half-raised himself and Lyda began to grunt softly under him, he suddenly looked into Zita's eyes. Paper eyes, but still Zita's. It was the photograph from Taboo, spread over two pages. Now, thought Inni, I am in Pompeii. The lava is pouring over me, and I shall stay like this forever. A man, half on top of a woman who, in the unthinkable "later", no one will know was not his wife, his head raised and looking at something that had become invisible forever. What he felt was sorrow. A hundred times he had seen this photograph, but now it was as if behind this portrait pinned to the brown wallpaper with four drawing pins, there was a universe consisting only of Zita, which he would never be able to inhabit again. But what was it? Cool, green eyes cut from impenetrable stone. Had they ever looked at him with love? Her mouth stood slightly open as if she were about to say something, or had just said something that would forever put an end to Zita and Inni — a Namibian curse, an annihilating, soft-sounding formula. It would wipe out the juxtaposition of their ridiculous names and would banish him forever from her life, not only from the time that was still to come — that would be just bearable — but also from times already past, so that what had existed would then no longer exist. For eight years he would simply not have been there! He looked more and more intently at the paper face that every second changed further into an unfamiliar, rebuffing mask. There was no doubt that it saw him and therefore excluded him, because it was at the same time looking at someone else with the love that was no longer intended for him but for the only other person she had been looking at while the photograph was taken — the photographer.

  "Nice noodle, that girl's got," said Lyda. She sat up. He saw that her breasts were now silver, too. The stuff was everywhere, on his face, his chest, her face, everywhere!

  He stood up, saw his silver figure walk past the mirror, and got dressed.

  "I don't want to get used to you," said Lyda, and it sounded like a point of order at a meeting.

  He waved to the silvery, now suddenly tearstained blotch of her face and went out into the street of silent, death-feigning houses with their sleeping people. He drove straight to the city park and by a pond tried to wash the silver, the outward sign of his removal from Zita's life, from his hands. But he did not succeed, and it only became worse. Five o'clock passed. Nature, in which animals do not know one another and no one loves anyone, awakened.

  A photographer, he thought, and remembered that he had first met Zita at a photographic exhibition, standing in front of a portrait of herself. He had seen the photo before he had seen her, and he did not know who betrayed whom, the woman in the photograph, the woman who stood before it, or the other way around. Some photographs, like that famous one of Virginia Woolf at the age of twenty, in which she looks sideways, are so perfect that the living being they represent seems a fabrication, something made so that a photograph may be taken of it. Inni had realized that if he wished to become acquainted with the woman in the photograph, he would have to address the woman standing in front of it, and this he had done. The photo hung in a rather dark corner, but he had at once been sucked towards it. Power emanated from it. It seemed as if that face, which could never really belong to a living human, had existed for thousands of years, independent of all else and completely absorbed in itself — an equilibrium.

  He remembered clearly that he had begun to feel slightly dizzy as he approached her. She had walked away from her portrait, which made it easier, and stood by a window, a very soft layer of light all around her, alone. She had the total equanimity of someone who had been made solely to be different from the others without ever being conscious of it, a different order of being that consisted of only one member — her. And so he had entered her world without ever becoming a member of it, and he had wrought damage in it while refreshing himself on the perfect equilibrium. And now he was about to be punished for it.

  Slowly it grew lighter. He shivered with cold. A large heron flew over, lurched, and then landed in the reeds with clattering wing movements. For the rest all was silent, and it seemed to Inni as if he were standing still for the first time, as if since that first meeting with Zita he had never stopped walking and had come all the way here in one long haul, in one movement, in order to stand by this pond with silver smudges on his hands and, who knows, on his face, too. He decided not to remove them and to go home at once.

  If everything he was thinking was true, he would have to be punished now, and the sooner the better. Nothing was sure any longer. This, then, was chaos, and chaos was what frightened him most in life — the chaos into which he would be flung back if she left him.

  * *

  It did not turn out the way he had thought. Of course Zita was in love with the photographer and of course she had slept with him. He had been her first man since she had been with Inni, just as Inni had been the first man in her life. With the absolute certainty of someone who lives by laws, she now knew she would have to leave Inni, and because she loved him and knew of his dread of chaos, this grieved her. But there was nothing to be done about it. It would happen the way it happens in Namibia, without a sound, swiftly, and without a single crack in the crystal. She kissed him when he came in, said that she had something to wash off that funny silver with, helped him remove it, stood close against him, and took him into bed with her. Never had he loved her so much. He would have liked to push first his head and only then all the rest right inside her and stay there forever. But when it was all over and she was asleep like a newborn sister of Tutankhamun, so terrifyingly still as if she had not breathed for centuries, as if she had not only such a short while before been a frenzied, shouting maniac, he knew that he had discovered nothing about his fate.

  She was absent, as he had been all these years. He got up and took a sleeping tablet from his stock. But when he awoke in the early afternoon, she was still the same as in the morning, as last year and the year before — a marsh of perfection into which anyone who ventured too far for the first time would drown.

  The weeks passed. Zita saw her Italian, slept with him, let herself be photographed by him. And each time another photo was taken, another fleck of Inni dissolved into the air of Amsterdam. The new love was the crematorium of the old. So it happened that one day, as Inni was walking across the Koningsplein, a speck of ash floated into his eye which would not come out until Zita licked it away with the tip of her tongue and said he did not look well.

  * *

  That was one Friday afternoon, and what was to happen next had little to do with Italians and with love, but rather with a subterranean, unwritten Namibian law mysteriously handed down through the ages — a law according to which accounts must be settled once every eight years, but then for good on a Friday afternoon. On such afternoons there must be men in that country who are doomed to die a terrible death. But as with so many ancient customs, the sharper edges had worn away in the diaspora. Inni would be banished, but that it would happen on this particular day he did not know. Zita had made her calculations and she no longer belonged to Inni. That day she would leave for Italy with her Italian, who like her had no money. What would happen there she did not know, and she somehow had a feeling that it did not concern her. It would happen, that was what mattered.

  After she had licked the speck from Inni's eye, he sat down at his desk. He had an hour and a half to hand in his horoscope at Het Parool for the Saturday supplement. He leafed through Marie Claire, Harper's Bazaar, Nova, and his books of stars. He copied something here, invented something there, and busied himself with the destinies of other people because they were going to read it. When he arrived at his own constellation, Leo, he had just read in Harper's that things would go well with him and in Elle that the outlook was gloomy. He put down his pen and said to Zita, who had lain down on the sofa by the window in order to look out over the Prinsengracht for the last time, "Why are you never allowed to write, Dear Cancer, you will ge
t cancer, or Leo, something dreadful will happen to you today, your wife will leave you and you will commit suicide?" Zita knew he was now thinking of his aunt and of Arnold Taads, and the green of her eyes darkened, but he did not notice and chuckled. She turned her head towards him and looked at him. A total stranger was sitting at a desk, grinning. She laughed. Inni stood up and went towards her. He stroked her hair and wanted to lie down beside her.

  "No," she said, but this in itself meant nothing. It could be part of a game in which she had to, or wanted to, taunt him or in which he had to tell her a story.

  "This time you have to pay," she said. That was not new either. He felt a great desire rising in him.

  "How much?" he asked.

  "Five thousand guilders."

  He laughed. Five thousand guilders. He unbuttoned her blouse. The most he had ever paid her was a hundred guilders. They always had to laugh at that. Usually they would lie on top of the bank note so that they could hear it rustling. She always showed him later what she had bought with it, or she invited him out to dinner somewhere, and once she had, with her serenest look, walked into the house of a whore in the red-light district and had handed over the money without a word.

  "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 M
ASS

  ARNOLD TAADS 1953

  UNTIL 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.