And come they did.
In that silent room, the story of his family was unfolded, as in a recitative according to the gospel of Arnold Taads. There was no place in this devastating account for the light relief of an aria. Instead, there came every now and again, welling up from an abyss of doom and sorrow, the deep sigh of the dog, which the anonymous composer had interpolated in masterly fashion; for exactly in the brief interval after the description of yet another Wintrop folly, aberration, or monstrous deed, the dog, with a perfect sense of timing, let a thrust of air escape from the subterranean labyrinths to which he was apparently connected.
Did they rehearse? wondered Inni. Dogs do not live all that long, and with one extra portion of goulash a week they clearly did not expect too many visitors. The only possible answer was that these lectures, sermons, recitatives, were also delivered in solitude, with the dog doing duty as continuo, punctuation, and emphasis. Light, air — this talented animal had learned to fill the invisible airstream that envelops us and partly flows through us, with affects and affirmations. He had discovered the meaning of destiny and disgust, not leaving them hanging in the indifferent surrounding air, prey to the destructive metronomics of the mantelpiece clock. On the contrary he filled the air in artistic convolution with his one-eyed master, with something that was at the same time the echo of what had just been uttered and a lighter, more vicious whiplash forcing the soloist to maintain the tension thus far achieved.
* *
This tension, Inni was to learn, was a negative force. He did not appreciate it immediately, though that first evening already contained the seed of his friendship with Arnold Taads. One of his characteristics — and this, too, he did not know at the time, because whatever his own views on the matter, he had simply not yet lived long enough — was that he could never turn his back on anyone in whom he had once become interested. Often these were what the outside world, the world of all other people combined, would call "odd fish", people who seemed totally incongruous with Inni's sarcastic or urbane style. "There's another one from Inni's sewer, madhouse, collection, underworld . . . Who on earth did I see you with at Schiphol yesterday? . . . How can you possibly spend an evening with her? ... Are you still seeing that same girl?"
But all that came later.
Now it was Arnold Taads, a man whose relations with the world had been unsuccessful and who therefore pushed the world away from himself in high-pitched, sharp tones as if he were still its master. If this messenger of renunciation had been the fifth Evangelist, he would have had a seagull as his symbol, a solitary grey shape on a rock, standing out against the darker shades of an ominous sky. Inni had seen them in nature films, stalked by telephoto lenses. How they suddenly threw their beaks wide open, let out a piercing cry of rage and warning, and with vigorous wingbeats, swept into the sky, where still alone, they sailed away on an invisible, gently heaving airstream. And then again, at intervals those cries, as if something had to be slashed, demolished.
The clock struck. The man and the dog stood up.
"I'll take you to the bus stop," said Arnold Taads.
From a stand in the hall he took a wooden, umbrellalike object covered with a kind of shiny parchment.
"This is a parong," he said. Indeed, no sooner were they outside than the rain was making loud tapping noises on the stretched surface. Everything fitted. As they walked down the garden path, Inni looked back at the house, and even more than when they were inside, he was conscious of the fierce loneliness to which this man had condemned himself. There are many different forms of suffering, and although Inni, in retrospect, must have had his fair share of unhappiness, it is nevertheless rare for the raw state of suffering to be revealed to someone of his age as clearly as happened now. Suffering, not as an event, but as a deliberately sought, irrevocable punishment. Irrevocable because no other people were involved in it, because this man who was marching along beside him so buoyantly and robustly, like an athlete who has beaten the world record, appeared to suffer from himself, in himself. Without being able to define it at the time, Inni knew he was here confronted with the smell of death, a realm from which one cannot return if, perhaps by accident or simply through inattention, one has strayed into it.
He was relieved when the bus, exactly on time, drove off. Arnold Taads and his dog had already vanished into the night, the rain, the woods.
The bus, the train, the long walk down the tree-lined roads of Hilversum, along which the villas stood like dark tombs in their gardens, and sultry, heavy scents of flowers after rain — among all this sweetness was a strange taste of farewell. To what exactly he did not yet know, but that a farewell had to be said, was certain.
That night he did not dream of Arnold Taads because he could not sleep. Yet the vision he had, in which Taads played a part, was more like a dream than anything else. His host was sitting opposite him, exactly as he had done in reality that evening. He was undoubtedly the same man who had taken him to the bus stop a few hours earlier, the man with the two skins and the one eye, a person who had appeared in his life as an instrument of fate. Inni could never refrain from attaching to the word appear that special significance that, for Catholics, it has had since Fatima and Lourdes. Nor could it be denied that Arnold Taads was more of an apparition than anything else, and a seated one at that, a variant never mentioned with reference to the Virgin Mother. The other paraphernalia were all there. From the standard lamp poured a constant nimbus of electrified sanctity around the battered face. The only thing that did not really fit was that this sanctity was unwilling to impart itself to the actual face, which with its many incongruities, appeared to preclude serenity. This was a saint broken in two, who had already suffered so much that he was allowed to bathe in this unearthly glow but whose face still showed so many traces of other, darker worlds that you could not even be sure you were not dealing with a deceptive manifestation of the devil. And now a pimple, lump, wart - he wasn't sure exactly what — some kind of unevenness, an imperfection of the skin, had become noticeable, and the heavenly lamplight carved more sharply the two deep, scornful, tormented furrows running from the sides of the nose to the mouth. Even more than the eyes, because even the blind, directionless eye joined in and filled at least half of the geometric room with unseen torments, he remembered in the half-sleep of that night those two furrows that, like thin puppet strings, controlled the corners of the mouth, making them rise and fall independently of each other. Inni was to regale his friends with the associated story until well into old age, though never without feeling a knife-thrust of guilt towards the dead man he was betraying, who had, in fact, perished through the impact of that story.
"I can't go back to the Rocky Mountains," said Arnold Taads. "Too old. They don't want me any more. That is why I go to a lonely valley in the Swiss Alps every year. You probably can't form a mental picture of it, and I shan't tell you where it is. I never do. I rent a deserted farmhouse that the owners use only in the summer. People, even those people, have become soft, pampered. Nobody can be alone any more, and no one wants to be alone. They refuse to face the winter and the loneliness up there. As soon as the first snow falls, the valley becomes totally isolated. You can only get there on skis."
"What about food?" asked Inni.
"I go down to fetch it once every two weeks. I don't need much. You can live on very little, but nobody knows that these days. In any case I can't carry much on my back, because it is a six-hour trip."
Inni nodded. Six hours! "How am I to imagine that?" he asked.
Arnold Taads screwed up one eye into something that looked like an obscene wink which lasted for several minutes.
"Like this," he said. "Stand beside me." (This was to become Inni's celebrated mime number on skis.) "We're going up, we're climbing. Sharp east wind. Unpleasant. Remember, you're carrying a rucksack on your back. It's heavy. There's fourteen days' food in it, for the dog as well. We have another four hours to go. Look at me."
The eye was still screw
ed up.
"You've still got your eye open. I can see with only one eye. The blind eye is closed now. Shut your right eye. That distorts the perspective, and it eliminates a good thirty per cent of normal vision. Look. Quite dangerous on a trip like this. Try it out."
Part of the right half of the room was cut off.
"If I go too fast, there is always a risk of something — a stone, a branch, an obstacle that I don't see."
"And then?"
Arnold Taads had sat down again. Inni found it difficult to imagine that the reopened, gleaming eye was really a hole which distorted the world so that the left eye had to fight a double battle to guard its owner against a fatal fall in the snow or on the ice.
"Then I might fall and break my leg. In theory, but it is possible."
The east wind blew through the room. The afternoon sun reflected the blinding light of the glacier in his one eye. No houses anywhere, no people. The world as it had always been, without interference. In the vast, white space lay a small figure, the skis jutting out crosswise like the first sticks of a campfire. A doll's leg twisted the wrong way round. "And what will you do then?"
Freeze to death of course, he thought, but for the answer that came he was unprepared.
"Then I give the Alpine distress signal." And without any warning his host bellowed "Hilfe!" raised his hand in adjuration as if to summon the same cruel silence to the room as reigned in that distant fateful valley, and then silently but with open mouth counted up to three and called out again "Hilfe!" one, two, three, "Hilfe!" His face turned purple in the process, and the glass eye looked as if it was about to pop out of its socket, through the terrible force of the shout.
Inni looked at the contorted, distressed carnival mask in front of him. Never before had he seen such a defenceless face. He felt embarrassment and pity — the embarrassment that he would always feel in the presence of someone else's intimate actions and the pity for a man who has been lying with a broken leg in a deserted valley for years and has no one to tell it to.
"I will keep on doing that, three times in a row, counting up to three each time until I have no strength left. Sound carries a long way in the mountains."
"But if there is no one there to hear?"
"Then the sound does not exist. Only I hear it. But it is not intended for me. If that sound does not reach the stranger for whom it is intended, it does not exist. And it won't take long before I shall not exist any more, either. You freeze, you become drowsy, you don't call out any more, you die."
Of course the dog did not understand these words, but the decisive tone born out of future disaster could not fail to produce an effect. Athos got up, whimpered softly, and shook himself as if to throw something off.
"By the time they start looking for me, Athos will already be dead," said Taads. "That is what troubles me most of all. My own death is a calculated risk, and there ought to be a way to safeguard Athos from that. But there isn't."
It was the first time that someone had told Inni Wintrop the precise details of his death, even though it would be years before it occurred.
* *
Opulence, not wealth, was the word to describe the interior of his aunt's spacious villa. Chesterfields, seventeenth-century cupboards, paintings of the Dutch school, a voluptuous Renaissance ivory crucifix, entire families of Sevres and Limoges, Persian carpets, servants — he was being wrapped up in it all as in a warm shawl.
"How people can live among the shit of the past is a mystery to me," said Taads when they were alone for a moment.
"Everything is tainted. Everything has already been admired by others. Antique stinks. Hundreds of eyes that have rotted away long ago have looked at it. You can tolerate it only if you have a junkyard inside yourself as well."
Inni did not reply. If this was so contemptible, there must be something wrong with him too. He thought it was all blissfully comfortable, and at the same time it expressed power and therefore distance from the world outside.
"Therese, a bourgeois is being born this afternoon," said Taads as his aunt entered the room. "And you are standing by the cradle. Just look at the delighted face of your new nephew. He recognizes his natural surroundings. Watch the easy grace with which he is immediately turning into a Wintrop."
Arnold Taads's entry had been impressive enough. Even when formulating it to himself, Inni thought it sounded exaggerated. But that afternoon he had discovered, for once not judging by his own example, that a distance can exist between people which expresses such a terrible otherness that anyone witnessing it will almost die of melancholy. Everyone knows these things, but no one has always known them — upright-walking creatures of the same species, who moreover use the same language to make it clear to each other that there is an unbridgeable chasm between them. A fool — this Inni could see, too — had arranged this lunch. The three plates from which they were to eat — the "uncle" had not yet manifested himself — were practically engulfed by an overabundance of cold meats. My God, how many ways there are to mess about with the corpses of animals. Smoked, boiled, roasted, in aspic, blood red, black and white checkered, fatty pink, murky white, marbled, pressed, ground, sliced. Thus death lay displayed on the blue-patterned Meissen. Not even a whole school could have eaten all that. Taads, who looked much smaller in this house, stood behind the chair assigned to him and surveyed the battlefield. Filtered sunlight caressed the white, the yellow, the soft, the hard, and the blue-veined cheeses.
"This is a Brabant lunch," said his aunt. She raised her face towards Taads, full of anticipation. It was for him she had put on this display. Taads remained silent. The single eye scanned the table mercilessly, relentlessly. At last the verdict came, a whiplash. "I say, Therese, haven't you got any ham?"
His aunt reeled under the blow. Red blotches rushed to her face. She staggered out of the room, and from the hall they heard a long, smothered wail that ran up the stairs at a gallop and vanished behind the slam of a door.
"This is a Brabant lunch," Taads said with satisfaction as he sat down. "Revolting late-Burgundian affectation. Those wealthy textile farmers still seem to think they are the heirs of the Burgundian court. This is the Bavaria of the Netherlands, my boy. A Calvinist doesn't belong here."
"I thought you were a Catholic, too," said Inni.
"North of the great rivers, all Dutchmen are Calvinists. We don't believe in too much, too long, or too dear. If these people here had their way, you'd be sitting at the table until three o'clock."
There was a tap on the door. A girl came in with a dish of ham that she put down in front of Taads.
"Will this be all right, sir?"
She was tall and slender, with big breasts and a crooked comedian's face in which green eyes could barely control their laughter. She spoke with a broad Brabant accent.
Inni fell in love with her. Later (the dreadful, mischievous later that seemed to rule over everything and in which all experiences were to be filed as in a court of law), he would define those sudden, senseless infatuations: "The physical element has almost nothing to do with it. At most it helps to make you aware of it a little sooner. It is the knowledge, instinctive, sudden, and sure, that somebody is okay."
"Okay?"
"Yes, that she is in tune with herself. I can't fall for someone who is not in tune with herself. And the other keystone — it is a structure after all — is that you know she has something for you."
"Has something for you?"
"Yes. That if the time and the place are right, there is a logic in the encounter."
Logic. The very word would make any lover run a mile. But that was just it. It had to be entirely logical, going to bed with such a person. You knew it would happen because it had to happen. The only thing left to be done was to inform the other person. That was the seduction. The certainty of the outcome was a great help. That, and the strange contradiction that the bed bit was not the main thing at all. This you began to see more clearly when, on occasion, you yourself were the other person.
What mattered was whether you were in tune. But the longing, the quivering, that odd, desperate feeling, always the same, which he experienced now at this table, watching her walk so straight and hearing her say that one sentence with that deliciously soft lilt while she glanced at him briefly with her green mocking eyes that laughed at "that old fool with his glass eye and that skinny young one with his funny look as if he couldn't keep his eyes off you" — that had to be there first. Only then came the "verification", a question of adoration, of woman worship. He had been declared mad by his friends as he was off on one of his missions again, flying to the other end of the world merely to follow a line, a thought that someone had left in him and that he had to verify at all costs. Was it so or was it not so? Would he have a chance, with that person, of a life that, if he chose to take it, would become a reality? That was the point. The search was a labour of love, but he could not explain this to anyone.
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