Van Hulle listened without saying anything, silent as usual, though a brief blaze flared up intermittently in his dull eyes.
He found these clarion calls disturbing; he would have preferred a quieter, more intimate patriotism: Bruges venerated in a cult, like a dead woman around whose tomb a few friends gather.
‘Yes,’ Bartholomeus objected, ‘but how can we expunge all the conquerors?’
‘There were no conquerors,’ was Farazyn’s riposte. ‘Restore Flemish here and the race will be renewed, whole again, as it was in the Middle Ages. Even Spain itself could not affect its spirit. It did leave something behind, but only in the blood. Its conquest was rape and the only result was children in Flanders with its dark hair and amber complexion … You still see some like that even today.’
As he spoke, Farazyn turned round towards one of van Hulle’s daughters. Everyone smiled. Barbara was, indeed, an example of this alien kind, her hair a violent brown, her lips red as a
chilli in her darkish complexion, while her eyes were still those of the original race, the colour of the water in the canals.
She was listening to the discussion with slightly feverish interest, filling up the stoneware mugs with beer, while her sister, Godelieve, indifferent, her mind elsewhere one would have said, accompanied the noisy discussion with the purr of her lacemaking pillow.
The painter looked at them. ‘True,’ he said, ‘one is Flanders, the other is Spain.’
‘But they have the same soul,’ Farazyn countered. ‘Everyone in Flanders is the same. Spain never touched the soul … What did it leave us: a few street names, such as Spanjaardstraat in Bruges, some inn signs and, here and there, a Spanish House with a gabled façade, sea-green windowpanes and a flight of steps from which death often came down. And that’s all. Bruges has remained intact, I tell you. It’s not like Antwerp, which wasn’t raped by its conquerors, but loved them. Bruges is the Flemish soul entire; Antwerp is the Flemish soul occupied by the Spanish.
Bruges is the Flemish soul that has remained in the shade; Antwerp is the Flemish soul sitting in the alien sun. From that point onward Antwerp was more Spanish than Flemish and remains so today. Its bombast, its arrogance, its colour, its pomp are Spanish. Even its hearses,’ he concluded, ‘covered in gold like reliquaries.’
‘Besides,’ Bartholomeus added, ‘you only have to compare their painters. Bruges had Memling, who is an angel; Antwerp had Rubens, who is an ambassador.’
Borluut backed them up. ‘And their towers!’ he exclaimed.
‘Nothing tells you more about a people than their towers. They are made in its image and in its likeness. Now the bell-tower of Saint Saviour’s in Bruges is austere, one could call it a citadel of God. It has never wanted to express anything other than faith, its blocks of stone placed one on top of the other like acts of faith. The Antwerp tower, on the other hand, is airy, decorated with open-work, stylish and a little Spanish, too, with the stone mantilla draped over its skyline –’
Bartholomeus broke in with a pertinent remark: ‘No matter what you may say about Spain, it is fortunate for the whole of Flanders, from the sea to the Scheldt, even for Antwerp, which it corrupted to a certain extent, that the Spanish came, despite the Inquisition, the autos-da-fé, the red-hot pincers, the blood and the tears that flowed. Spain kept Flanders for Catholicism. It saved us from the Reformation because, without Spain, Flanders would have become Protestant like Zealand, Utrecht, all of the Netherlands, and if that had happened, Flanders would not have been Flanders!’
‘Agreed,’ said Farazyn, ‘but today all these convents represent a different danger. We have religious orders here as nowhere else in the world: Capuchins, Discalced Carmelites, Dominicans, seminarists, without counting the secular clergy; and so many orders for women: Beguines, Poor Clares, Carmelites, Redemptorists, Sisters of Saint Andrew, Sisters of Charity, Little Sisters of the Poor, the Dames anglaises, the Black Sisters of Bethel … That is what in part explains why there are ten thousand more women in the population here, something you don’t get in any other town in the world. Chastity means sterility, and the corollary of these ten thousand nuns is our ten thousand poor supported by the Welfare Board. That is not the way for Bruges to reverse its decline and become great again.’
Borluut spoke, his voice solemn. It gave one the feeling that what he was about to say was very important to him, a matter close to his heart.
‘Is that not what makes it great?’ he retorted to his friend.
‘Its beauty resides in its silence, and its glory in now only belonging to a few priests and poor people, that is to say to those who are purest because they have renounced the world. Its higher destiny is to be something which has outlived its time.’
‘No!’ Farazyn retorted. ‘It would be better to bring it back to life. Life is the only thing that matters, one must always seek life, love life!’
Borluut resumed his argument in urgent, persuasive tones: ‘Can one not also love death, love sorrow? The beauty of sorrow is superior to the beauty of life. It is the beauty of Bruges. Great glory that has gone! One last, fixed smile! Everything around us has withdrawn within itself: the waters are still, the houses closed, the bells whisper in the mist. That is the secret of its charm. Why want it to become like all the rest? It is unique.
Walking through Bruges is like walking through memories…’
Everyone was silent. It was late. Borluut’s impassioned evocation had touched their hearts. His voice had been as a bell sounding out an irreversible conclusion. And now it was as if it had left its wake in the room, the echo of a sound that was advancing and refusing to stop. It seemed as if the town, having been evoked, had poured all its silence into them. Even Barbara and Godelieve, rising to fill the empty mugs one last time, did not dare make any noise and softened their steps.
Each of them made his way home wrapped in thought, in contentment at an evening in which they had shared together their love of Bruges. They had talked of the town as if they were talking of a religion.
III
In the morning two days later Borluut set off for the belfry. It was his duty, henceforward, to sound the carillon on Sundays, Wednesdays and Saturdays, as well as on feast days, from eleven o’clock to midday.
As he approached the tower, the thought going through his mind was: to withdraw high above the world . Was that not what he could do now, what he would be doing from that day onwards when he climbed up there? For a long time, ever since he had been visiting old Baron de Vos in the bell-tower, he had had vague dreams of this life as a lookout, of its intoxicating solitude, like that of a lighthouse keeper. That was the reason, the real reason, for his haste to take part in the contest. He could admit it to himself now. It had not been solely due to his artistic sensitivity, to his affection for the town, nor to his desire to stop the silence and neglect, which were its beauty, being polluted by sacrilegious music. He had also immediately sensed the enchantment of being the sole possessor, so to speak, of the high belfry, of being able to ascend there whenever he liked, to look down on the world of men, to live as if on the threshold of infinity.
High above the world! He repeated the mysterious phrase to himself, a fluid phrase which seemed to soar itself, straight up into the air, then descend in steps to the heavy syllables of the world below … High above the world! At an equal distance between God and the earth. To have something of eternity while still remaining human so as to savour, thrill and feel through his senses, through his flesh, through his memories, through love, desire, pride, dream. The world: so much that was sad, evil, impure; high above: an ascension, taking flight to a Delphian tripod, a magical refuge in the air where all the ills of the world would melt away and die, as if the atmosphere were too pure for them.
So there he would make his abode, on the edge of the sky, the shepherd of the bells, living like the birds, so far from the city and men, on a level with the clouds…
After he had crossed the courtyard of the Draper’s Hall, he reach
ed the doorway to the inner buildings. The key he had been given drew a metallic screech from the lock, as if it were being forced by a sword and wounded. The door had opened; it closed of its own accord, as if responding instinctively to the invisible hand of the shadows. Immediately everything was dark once more, silent, and Borluut started to climb the stairs.
At first his feet stumbled; now and then he missed his footing, some steps being uneven, worn down like the coping round a well.
How many generations had flowed along here, as tireless as water!
How many feet had trodden the steps over the centuries to result in such wear! The stone staircase twisted round in short curves, tortuous, coiling round on itself like a snake, like the tendrils of a withered vine. He stormed up the tower as if he were
storming a rampart. Now and then an arrow-slit, a fissure in the masonry, let in some leaden daylight, a thin gash on the face of the gloom. Darkness distorts everything if it is only partial: you start to think the walls are moving, waving shrouds; a shadow on the ceiling is a beast crouching, ready to pounce…
The spiral staircase suddenly narrows, swirls like a stream drying up. Can he still get through up there, or is he going to be crushed against the sides? All at once the darkness increased.
Borluut felt he had already climbed more than a hundred steps, but he had not thought to count. By now his pace had adjusted to a rhythmical tread, instinctively shortened to adapt to the stone steps. But plunging into impenetrable darkness disoriented his senses. Borluut no longer knew in which direction he was going, whether forwards or backwards, whether up or down. Unable to see himself, it was in vain that he tried to determine which way his steps were taking him. He had the feeling he was descending, making his way down a subterranean staircase, in a deep mine, far from the light of day, through motionless landscapes of coal, and that he was going to come to a lake…
So Borluut stopped, slightly disconcerted at these fancies induced by the darkness. But he still seemed to be going up.
Despite the fact that his legs were still, it felt as if the stairs were undulating, carrying him on, as if it were the steps that were ascending one by one beneath his feet.
Above all no noise, except his own echo as a transient in the tower. And, barely audible, sometimes a bat, disturbed by the unaccustomed steps, unfolding its wings in the void and shivering in their soft velvet. But quickly silence returned, as far as a tower can ever be silent, can ever hush that vague rustling, that crumbling of something in the hourglass of time that it is, where the dust of centuries trickles down, speck by speck.
On the various floors Borluut came across bare, empty rooms; like granaries of silence.
He was still climbing. Now the stairs brightened; pure, white light came in through openings, the castellated platforms, the pierced architecture, and flowed over the steps, breaking in foaming waves, setting them suddenly ablaze.
Borluut was seized with joy, as at a truce, at convalescence, at being set free after the limbo of the dungeons. He had found himself again. He had ceased to be one with the night, absorbed by it. At last he could see himself. He felt intoxicated by being, by walking. A sudden, sharp wind ran over his skin. The abrupt flood of brightness gave him the feeling of moonlight on his face. Now he was ascending more quickly, as if the air were rarified, making his exertion freer, breathing easier. Gripped by a feverish urge to climb, he felt like running up the stone stairs. People often talk of the attraction of the abyss. There is also the abyss above . Borluut was still going up; he would
have liked to keep on going up for ever, melancholy at the thought that the stairway was doubtless going to stop and that at the end, on the edge of the air, he would still yearn to continue, go farther, higher.
At that moment an immense clamour flowed in, pouring along the narrow stairway. It was the wind, groaning all the time, ceaselessly going up, going down the steps; the sorrow of the wind which moans in the same voice in the trees, in sails, in towers. The sorrow of the wind which contains all other sorrows within it. In its shrill cries one can hear those of children; in its laments women’s grief; in its fury the hoarse sob of a man repulsed, broken. The wind that Borluut could hear was, it is true, a definite reminder of the earth, although very faint already. Up there it was nothing more than the semblance of complaints, faded voices, echoes of sorrows that were all too human and ashamed. The wind came from below. The only reason it was so afflicted was because it had passed through the town. But the grief it had taken on down there and which, reaching the top of the tower with the wind, groaned out loud, began to dissolve, to metamorphose from sorrow into melancholy and from tears into drops of rain.
Borluut felt this wind was truly the symbol of the new life he was entering upon, the life of a lookout, high above everything, vaguely dreamt of, attained by chance. For him as well, all his troubles would melt away within his soul, as the laments melted away in the wind.
He was still climbing. Here and there doors opened revealing vast rooms, dormitories with heavy joists where bells were sleeping. A vague feeling stirred within Borluut as he went over to them.
They were not entirely at rest, just as virgins are never completely at rest. Their sleep was visited by dreams. He felt as if they were about to move, stretch, moan like sleepwalkers. The incessant murmuring among the bells! A noise that persists, like the sound of the sea in shells! They never empty themselves entirely. Sound forming like beads of sweat! A condensation of music on the bronze…
As he went on and up, more bells appeared everywhere, aligned, appearing to kneel, in the same robes, living together in the tower as if in a convent. There were tall ones, slim ones, old ones in faded dress, young ones who were the novices who had replaced some ancients – every aspect of cloistered humanity which retains its variety beneath the uniformity of the Rule. A convent of bells in which most had been there since the foundation. It was in 1743 that the new carillon of forty-nine bells had been cast and hung in the belfry by Joris Dumery, replacing that of 1299. But Borluut was taken by the fancy that some of the original bells had survived, mingling with the new ones. However that may be, the same bronze had been recast to make the new bells, so that it was the old metal from the thirteenth century which continued its anonymous concert.
Borluut was already beginning to feel at home. He went to have a closer look at the bells that were going to live in dutiful submission to his authority. He wanted to get to know them. One by one he questioned them, called them by their name, inquired about their history. Sometimes the metal had a silvery patina, the marbling of a breakwater pounded by the tide, a complicated tattoo, bloody encrustations of rust and patches of verdigris like a dusting of pollen from resedas. Among this enchanting chemistry Borluut found, here and there, a date, like a jewel pinned on, Latin inscriptions winding round, and the names of godfathers and godmothers who had entrusted their memory to the new-born bell.
Touched and charmed by all these discoveries, Borluut was hurrying from one attraction to the next. The wind, stronger than ever at that height, suddenly turned violent and roared, but with a voice that was all its own now, beyond all human comparison, the voice of a force, an element whose only parallel was the voice of the sea.
Borluut sensed that he was approaching the battlemented platform of the belfry, where the stairway emerges at a staging post before continuing to the top of the tower. There, ensconced in one of the corners of the platform, is the carillonneur’s cabin, an ethereal dwelling, a glass chamber with six wide windows opening onto the empty air. He had to fight his way there. The wind was blowing more and more furiously, aggressively, like the torrent from a floodgate, in vast separate sheets, vicious bursts, tumbling masses, plunging weights, suddenly gathering, as compact as a wall. Borluut made his way forward, rejoicing in the struggle, as if the plundering wind, carrying off his hat and undoing his clothes, were trying to divest him of the world below and carry him, free and naked, into the healthy air of the high place.
F
inally he reached the little aerial abode. A welcoming inn at journey’s end! Warmth and silence! Borluut recognised it, nothing had been disturbed since the time when he sometimes used to come and visit Baron de Vos, the old master carillonneur, without suspecting that one day he would succeed him. Now he saw everything in sharper detail, since this confined space was already his and he, in his turn, was going to spend many future hours there. He was somewhat moved at the thought. He was going to live high above the world! And, as if in confirmation, he glimpsed the immense landscape through the high windows, the town lying there, down below, at the bottom, in an abyss. He didn’t dare look … He would feel dizzy … He had to get his eyes used to looking from the vantage point he had reached, which seemed like the edge of infinity.
Closer to him he surveyed the keyboard of the carillon with its yellowed ivory, its pedals, its articulated iron rods rising from the keys towards the clappers of the bells. Facing him, he discovered a small clock, very small, looking strange in the
immensity of the tower, producing its sound of the humble regularity of life, that pulse of things which is the envy of the human heart. He wondered whether the little clock was in time with the huge clock of the tower. It was right next to it, like a mouse living in the cage of a lion.
The hands on the small clock-face were about to show eleven o’clock. Immediately Borluut heard a rumbling, the uproar of a disturbed nest, the sound of a garden billowing in the wind when a storm is getting up.
It was a prolonged vibration, the prelude to the carillon which plays automatically before the hour strikes, operated by a brass cylinder pierced by square holes, like a piece of lace. Borluut, interested in the mechanism, rushed to the room where all the wires of the bells met the cylinder. He watched it, studied it.
He felt he was seeing the anatomy of the tower. All its muscles, its sensory nerves were laid bare. The bell-tower extended its huge body upwards, downwards. But this was where its essential organs were gathered, its beating heart, the very heart of Flanders, whose pulsations among the ancient cogwheels the carillonneur was at that moment counting.
The Bells of Bruges Page 3