The Discovery of Heaven

by Harry Mulisch

  After a few days Holland was so far away that it was if he had never been there. His mother's body in her white bed, Max's empty grave, his vanished father—none of that seemed to be his life anymore. He didn't get involved with anyone; he communed with things the whole day long. He wandered from morning till night through the maze of alleys, canals, bridges, dark doorways, silent squares; ate some tortellini here, a plate of spaghetti there; went into and out of churches and museums and allowed himself to get lost. If it took too long, he glanced at the little compass around his neck, with the plan of Venice in his head: those two relaxed intertwined hands, divided by the Grand Canal.

  That labyrinthine quality sometimes reminded him of his dream, as did the absence of trees and plants and wheels. Behind the Piazza San Marco he also discovered a church, San Moisè, the black facade of which was covered from top to bottom with a baroque eczema of statues and ornaments; when he stood close to it and threw his head back, it might be a fragment of the Citadel. The high altar was a wild monument, entitled St. Moses Receiving the Tablets of the Law on Mount Sinai.

  But apart from that his Citadel, where he was still the only person, was more the reverse of Venice. Not only because of the stream of people, which always moved along the same ant paths, and which he was soon able to avoid, but because it wasn't an interior without an exterior but more an exterior as an interior. Each time he emerged via a doorway or a narrow street into St. Mark's Square, it was like a bang on a drum. That gigantic marble-coated banqueting hall, with the sky as the ceiling as painted by Tiepolo with a real blue sky and feathery cloud! All that lightness and floating, whether it was Byzantine, Gothic, or Renaissance, the filigree arabesques of the basilica, the four horses that pulled it through the centuries, with the pink, newly built Doge's palace with its gallery of keys, with the teeth as balustrades, the shafts as pillars, the Gothic perforated eyes seem to carry the actual weight of the building—to think that such a thing could exist! At the end of the piazzetta, like a gateway to the great outside, the wide world, with the two colossal pillars of red and white granite, their capitals topped with the winged lion and a patron saint seated on a crocodile, between which for centuries death sentences had been carried out. Even criminals were allowed to die in beauty here: the last thing they had seen was the living water of the lagoon—and the church on the small island on the other side: Palladio's San Giorgio Maggiore.

  So there it finally was—no longer in Mr. Themaat's books, but in the sun and the Adriatic sea wind. The white marble facade with the two superimposed temple fronts, as harmonious as a fugue: behind it the bare redbrick nave, with the gray cupola at the intersection. Of course he also took the vaporetto to see everything at close quarters and from inside, sailing across the spot where for centuries the Doge had thrown a ring into the water annually, to seal his marriage with the sea.

  How could he be so fascinated by Venice when the city had so little to do with his Citadel? All things considered, Palladio's severe symmetries were completely out of place here too, because in Venice everything was precisely asymmetrical. The piazza wasn't an oblong but a trapezoid, the basilica was not on the axis; the windows of the Doge's palace did not reflect each other. Was he on the track of a law? Might it be that beauty was geometrically and musically calculable but that, in turn, perfection somehow diverged from it? Just as a straight line drawn with a ruler was always somehow less than a straight line when Picasso drew it without a ruler? Was there a difference between a dead and a living line? Should he perhaps start studying art history? But you couldn't study without your high school exams; besides, art didn't interest him at all for its own sake, but because of what was behind it.

  On Ascension Day he took an excursion to the mainland, to Vicenza. With a mainly English group he visited the Teatro Olimpico, with its fairytale interior without an exterior, and all those other churches and palaces that he knew so well from the library at Groot Rechteren, under the P of Palladio. They were no longer framed by the silent white of the page, but turned out to be standing next to other buildings, in certain streets, full of the din of cars and scooters, where in the squares old gentlemen stood and talked indignantly to each other, and then walked on arm in arm, where fruit sellers cried and young pizza bakers tossed their spinning circles of dough in the air, to allow the laws of nature to do their work in the spirit of Galileo and Newton.

  On the way back, the bus stopped at two other Palladian villas. First, just outside Vicenza, the Villa Rotonda: a vision in stone on top of a green hill, with its round central building another descendant of the Roman Pantheon, but now equipped with four entry doorways with staircases and Greek temple fronts, one in each direction—just as in families certain features suddenly recur double or fourfold.

  There, walking across the marble, between trompe l'oeil frescos of pilasters and divine figures, making the interior look like an exterior, he first noticed the dark-blond woman in the party. While he looked at an illustration of Diana hunting with her breast bared and a black dog, he suddenly felt her eyes focused on him. In a long white dress, with her hair worn loosely up, and her head slightly bent, which made her smile and the look in her large brown eyes even more sensual, she was standing on the other side of the Rotonda, near a depiction of a swaggering Hercules. He found it unpleasant. It interrupted his concentration, and he tried to ignore it; but back in the bus, too, where he was sitting in the front seat, he noticed that she was constantly looking at the back of his head. She was fifteen or twenty years older than him, but even if she'd been young, he still wouldn't have liked it. Those kinds of things were not for him. He knew that for many boys and girls there was nothing else, that it existed mainly for Max and possibly for his father too; he was less sure about his Granny, and he didn't want to think of his mother at all in this connection. For him sexuality had as little meaning as sports—up to now at least. He felt it was something for people who wanted to reproduce, but he had no need. He was sufficient unto himself.

  In the afternoon they drove from Padua along the provincial highway by the Brenta, lined with that unreal, poetic vegetation that only rivers create around themselves, which makes them sacred in innocent eyes. Not far from the river's mouth, as a conclusion to the excursion, they stopped at the Villa Foscari, nicknamed La Malcontenta. Because he felt overfed artistically, and also to escape the woman, he took only a quick look at the interior and then sat down on the grass under a weeping willow at the edge of the water.

  He hadn't expected that she would come to him. Suddenly she sank down right in front of him, cross-legged, in a way that reminded him of the string puppet he had once had: when you pulled the string in its crotch, its arms and legs shot upward. She was sitting so close to him that he could smell her: a smell that reminded him of autumn leaves and which perhaps did not come from a bottle. Around her neck and wrists she had at least twenty gold chains and bracelets.

  "Do you speak English?" she asked in English with a smile, but with a kind of German accent. When he sat up and nodded, she put a hand with long, slim fingers and red nails high on his thigh, no more than half an inch from his sex, and brushed her other hand through the hair on the back of his head. "Do you know how well that white lock of hair suits you?"

  Before he could push her away, which he probably wouldn't have dared to do anyway, both hands had disappeared. Then her right hand came forward again.

  "Marlene," she said. "Marlene Kirchlechner."

  "Quinten Quist."

  He shook hands with her and tried to withdraw his hand, but she kept hold of it.

  "Your hand's tense," she said, still looking at him. "It's as though you don't really want to touch mine. Relax it."

  At the same moment he realized she was right. He relaxed his muscles and only then felt the warm palm of her hand against his, which to his alarm produced warmth not only in his hand but in his whole body. She obviously saw what was happening, because as she let go of his hand, she leaned her head forward and looked at him with
the same look as just now in the Villa Rotonda. Within a minute she had succeeded in confusing him completely. He wanted to hold her hand again and at the same time wanted not to want that. But the touching was suddenly over.

  "How old are you, Quinten?"

  "I'll be seventeen in two weeks."

  She hesitated for a moment and looked at him. "Are you in Venice with your parents?"

  "No," he said curtly. "I'm alone."

  "So am I," said Marlene Kirchlechner. She lived in Vienna, she told him; she came here every year in May, to the place where she had been on her honeymoon with her dead husband—on the Lido in the Hotel Excelsior, always in the same suite, with a view of the sea. "What's stopping you?" she said as they sat together on the front seat as the bus drove across the embankment toward Venice, to the Piazzale Roma, the terminus for all motor traffic. "Come with me. There's a wonderful swimming pool; you won't find a pool in the whole of Venice. You can move in if you like. Where are you staying?"

  Quinten realized that undreamt-of adventures were suddenly possible, as they were in the kinds of novels that Clara Proctor was always reading. Here was a mature, pretty, voluptuous woman, obviously also stinking rich, who wanted to take him under her wing—but at the same time he knew that it was not to be for him. He felt that he mustn't be carried away by chance meetings, although it wasn't clear what that would distract him from, because he had nothing special to do. He was simply messing around: he could just as well have been somewhere else.

  When he said that he preferred to go back to his own room, she insisted on walking with him for a little while; she'd never been in Cannaregio, and she could take the water taxi back to the Lido. On the way she talked nonstop about herself, about her husband's vineyards in the Wachau on the Danube, which she now managed; fortunately she didn't ask him about his own circumstances. At the door of his hotel, under the laundry that hung like garlands from one side of the alley to the other, he was about to say goodbye; but she suggested having a drink somewhere first. A hearty Conegliano-Valdobbiadene prosecco, for instance, which went straight to your head: when you were in a place, you must always drink the local wine. Quinten never drank wine, but he was thirsty too.

  Looking for a terrace, a rarity in this district, they emerged via a wooden bridge and a low, dark sottoportego onto the inner courtyard of the sixteenth-century ghetto, to which all later ghettos owed their name. The houses were taller than in the rest of the city and there were even a few trees, like almost nowhere else in Venice. By a round well with a marble lid they sat down on a bench. Most of the shutters were closed; in many plant tubs there were spinning paper windmills. Apart from the doves in the alcoves and on the weathered windowsills, there was not a living thing to be seen—and in the falling dusk they looked in silence for a while at the great silence that hung over the stones.

  Suddenly Mrs. Kirchlechner put her cheek against his shoulder and began sobbing.

  "What's wrong?" he said in alarm.

  With her great eyes helplessly flooded, she looked up to him as if he were her father.

  "I don't know what's got into me .. . I'm in love with you, Quinten. The moment I saw you, it was like seeing a gold coin in the mud. At first I thought it was simply an impulse—I have those quite often; but now I realize that I obviously won't see you again. I can see that it's something completely different. I don't go for young boys at all, if that's what you're thinking perhaps. It's never happened to me. My husband was twice my age, and now I'm more than twice yours. Why aren't you twenty-six or sixty-six for all I care? Sixteen! It's impossible, I must be crazy!" Suddenly she stood up, took his face between her hands, and kissed him on both eyes. "Farewell, angel . .. may things go well with you."

  Before he could say anything, he saw her white figure waft across the campo, like a sheet that had freed itself from the clothespins, and disappear into the dark doorway.

  He looked at the black hole in alarm. What havoc had he caused? Should he go after her? And what then? No, it was best like this of course. That kind of woman simply existed in the great wide world; you had to get used to it. While store shutters rattled in the distance as they were pulled down, he walked back to his hotel. He put his mouth under the tap and splashed water on his face with both hands. On his bed he was going to read some more of his guide, but he fell asleep almost immediately—and was visited not by the SOMNIUM QUINTI but by fire .. .

  First he is living on the attic floor of a tall house, like those in the ghetto, where the square chimneys run along the outside walls. He calls out the window that the fire brigade should be summoned, at which everyone looks up and shrugs their shoulders. No problem. It'll be okay; just panicking over nothing. When the house is ablaze and all the beams have been transformed into architraves of fire, he turns out to be living somewhere in a basement. Suddenly smoke starts curling up there, too, between the slabs, and again no one listens to him, so everything goes up in flames . . .

  He was awakened by hunger. Outside it had grown dark; it was ten o'clock. He cracked his thumbs and got up with aching limbs. In a small restaurant near the Grand Canal he ate a plate of ravioli, surrounded by locals and gondoliers in striped tunics, everyone talking loudly in a language sometimes reminiscent of Italian. Now and then he had a vision of Marlene from Vienna. In the Excelsior, surrounded by Sikhs, Japanese magnates, and American oil barons, she was now of course eating lobster and caviar under crystal chandeliers; but it was as though his dream had already thrown up a barrier, relegating her to the past once and for all.

  Thanks to the baron he was fortunately rich himself. He allowed himself a second espresso, put a five-hundred lire additional tip on the bill, and wandered into town for a little while.

  In that deserted midnight Venice, with all the shutters closed, the terraces cleared away and no life anywhere, he stopped on a bridge over a narrow canal. To the left and right, weathered house walls with rainpipes rose up out of the motionless seawater; a little farther on, across a side canal, was a second bridge; at the end the view was blocked off by the refined back of a Gothic palazzo, which was of course really the front. He looked at the green seaweed-covered steps, which everywhere led down to the water from dark arches with barred gates and continued underwater. The complete silence.

  Had his mother ever been here? His father? Max? Suddenly the silence filled with a scarcely audible rustling, and a little later a gondola appeared under the bridge he was standing on, the gleaming halberd on the prow. Three silent Japanese girls appeared, and then the gondolier, straightening and with the merest push steering the gondola slightly toward the side, where with an indescribably perfect movement—which formed a unity with the gondola, the water, the silence, the city—he propelled himself by pushing off from a house with his foot for a second to keep up speed.

  At that moment Quinten saw a white glimpse of Marlene Kirchlechner on the other bridge, immediately disappearing when she realized that he had seen her. His eyes widened. While he slept she had been waiting for him all that time, had followed him to the restaurant, waited again, and again followed him. It was clear: he had to leave Venice at once—preferably this evening.

  Maybe it was the sound of its name, Florence, that made him expect the town would be even more silvery and silent. But he found himself in a noisy, stinking cauldron of traffic that he had forgotten after five days in Venice. Moreover, if everything there was light and open, everything here was heavy, closed. The function of the sea, which protected Venice sufficiently, was here fulfilled by thick walls, colossal blocks of stone, bars, buildings like fortresses; the beauty was virtually only indoors, in palaces and museums. But exactly what distinguished Florence from Venice gave it a Citadel-like quality: that reconciled him a little with his disappointment. Because all the affordable hotels were full, he had to make do with a grubby hostel, where he shared a room with seven others, most of them students but also a few older men; apart from a bed he had only a chair to use, on which he could look at the crucifix above
the door.

  Surrounded by international snoring, he thought back for the first time to his room at Groot Rechteren. Or did it no longer exist? Had Korvinus gotten his hands on everything by now? Of course it wouldn't happen as quickly as that. He felt as if he had been away from home for months, but it was scarcely a week. He hadn't sent any message from Venice, and he now resolved to write to his grandmother as soon as possible. But not only did he not write a letter, even when he passed a stand with postcards on it—Piazza della Signoria, Palazzo Pitti, Ponte Vecchio, Battistero—an uncontrollable revulsion took hold of him, which prevented him buying one and writing even "Greetings from Florence" on it.

  He did, however, buy a series of cards in the Uffizi, to put on the chair next to his bed. In the cataract of art treasures that was poured out into that exuberant museum street, he was struck by an Annunciation by Leonardo da Vinci: an angel who was approaching the Virgin Mary rather furtively, with his head bent and the guilty look of someone who knows that what he has in mind is no good. No wonder the Mary seemed to be thinking: "Who are you? What are you doing here?" Quinten had learned at high school that annuntiare meant "announce": the angel was going to announce to her that, at a later date, she would be impregnated by the Holy Ghost; but according to him there was something much more going on here than simply an "announcement"; this was the event itself. In a moment he was going to pounce on her. Because why wasn't Joseph there? Surely he had the right to know for certain that his fiancee had not deceived him with the window cleaner? Every woman could maintain that she had become pregnant out of pure piety. He began to look for Annunciations in the other rooms too, but in none of them was Joseph there. The sucker was obviously in the carpenter's workshop, where he was earning his daily bread by the sweat of his brow, making crosses for the Romans perhaps, while at home his bride-to-be was listening to the seductive angel patter and letting herself go with an envoy of God. Suddenly he now remembered a relief of the Annunciation on the front of the Rialto bridge in Venice. On the left-hand pillar, at the beginning of the arch, you saw the angel Gabriel, at the highest point of the bridge the dove that he had thrown up, and on the right-hand pillar Mary, waiting for the Holy Ghost in complete abandon. So that dove was no less than the angel's holy seed!