The Bells of Bruges

by Georges Rodenbach

  The marriage had been announced and was close at hand.

  Joris frequently came to van Hulle’s house. Barbara was transfigured by joy. At last she was going to change her life, be happy. Sometimes they went out together. Joris took her to the Museum to see Memling’s great triptych which contains a picture of St. Barbara, her patron saint, because in her hand she was holding a tower. Was it not an allegory of the two of them? He had often thought of it when their love was just beginning. The tower was him, since he lived there, since he was its music, that is its presence, its consciousness. And Barbara was going to carry all that, to take it up in her slender hand, as St. Barbara in the triptych holds in her palm a tiny gold bell-tower, which relies on her and would break if she should take it into her mind to change her gesture.

  Joris went into ecstasies over the picture. He looked at Barbara tenderly. ‘My tower is in your hand and my heart is in the tower.’

  Barbara smiled. Joris showed her the donors on the wings: old Willem Moreel, burgomaster of Bruges, and his wife, Barbara de Vlaenderbergh, with all their children, five sons and eleven daughters, set out in rows, with their different-sized heads overlapping like the tiles on a roof. A House of Happiness, made with faces! An edifying example of the ancient families of Flanders!

  Borluut gave himself up to reverie, to dreams of a similar line of descendants which might perhaps come from them to increase the race.

  Thus love had restored him to the world. Loving Barbara, he loved the town less, its obsolescence, its silence.

  Now, even when he climbed the tower at the regular times set for the carillon, he no longer had his previous sense of rising up high and far away, of leaving his self and the town behind, of ascending high above the world . He took the world, his world, with him, up to the top. No longer did he drift in the sky, with the clouds. From the battlemented platform of the bell-tower he watched the town, observed the passers-by with interest, thought of Barbara, called to mind her dark complexion, her haunting aroma, above all her too-red lips. Down below, the roofs were piled up, red as well. He compared them. The faded tiles had weathered into the last pinks of twilight, the crimsons of old banners. There were feverish reds and bleached reds, reds of clotted light, reds of rust and of wounds, but all fixed, defunct, lifeless.

  It was like a graveyard of reds, far below, above the grey town.

  So then Joris would search until he believed he could see, right at the bottom, the only living, blooming red, the red of Barbara’s lips, the burning chilli red that made all the tiles look pale.

  IX

  One day Borluut had some great news for Bartholomeus, good news that would fill the painter with joy. One of the aldermen had come to tell him that the Town Council had finally approved a commission for his friend, an important work for which he had been waiting for years: a large-scale series of pictures to decorate the walls of the Council Chamber in the Town Hall. For Bartholomeus it was the realisation of a long-cherished dream, to use the talent for decoration which he felt he possessed and which it pained him to leave idle. He would finally be able to release onto the walls the splendid processions he held captive within him.

  Borluut set off for the precinct of the Beguinage where Bartholomeus lived. An impulse had taken the painter there, a feeling that the solitude and silence would be good for his work.

  The Beguinage of Bruges was in a state of decline, was slowly being abandoned. There were only some fifteen Beguines left, a constantly depleting flock around the Grand Mistress. They only occupied a few of the houses – their shutters green and white, their façades rain-coloured – but it was impossible to tell which were empty and which not because the windows of both were equally sparkling and so discreet, contenting themselves simply with reflecting the elms in the raised strips of grass and the chapel opposite, with being faithful mirrors of the precinct.

  So for lack of Beguines, some dwellings were let out to lay people, mostly old. Bartholomeus had had the idea of setting up his studio there. The little whitewashed chamber was a true

  monk’s cell. He had no need of a big room since, having been unable to find any commissions for large decorative pieces, he had perforce to confine himself to pictures that would fit on an easel, small-scale canvases he worked over slowly, with infinite pains, bringing them to harmonious perfection, simply for the pleasure of the task itself. He was not concerned with selling them, nor did he paint to please others. He had a small private income, enough on which to live frugally, and he was happy with that. Working in the Beguinage was very fruitful. The windows let in a perfect light, a vibrant light such as you get in the north where a kind of grey gauze turns the sun to silver. And such solitude, such quiet.

  Bartholomeus’s work was accompanied by the sound of the occasional canticle chanted punctually at lauds by the choir of Beguines. He would come across them as they returned, one by one, to their little houses with the air of sheep returning to the fold. He had studied and caught on paper some of their postures, their cautious gestures, their Gothic walk, the calm flight, white wings spread, of their cornets, and above all the folds, like organ pipes, of their black robes. He had dreamt of being the painter of the Beguines and, lying in wait behind his windows, eyes always on the alert, had painted a few pictures inspired by them and accumulated numerous drawings and sketches.

  Then he had turned away from them, finding that art still too exclusively bound to the forms of the material world. He looked within himself, looked elsewhere.

  Now the news Borluut brought had once more turned his ideal, turned his life upside down.

  ‘Well? Are you pleased?’ his friend asked seeing his indifferent reaction.

  ‘Several years ago I would have been pleased,’ the painter replied. ‘Now I’ve been thinking along other lines.’

  ‘But your main talent was for large-scale paintings, you said.

  You declared that decoration was the supreme form of painting.’

  ‘Perhaps. But there are more interesting kinds of painting.’

  Then Bartholomeus went over to the corners of the Beguines’

  former visiting-room with its light-coloured walls, which he used as his studio, rummaged among canvases and framed pictures, all of which were turned to the wall, made a choice, hesitated, then took one out and put it on the easel.

  ‘There!’ he said. ‘Some objects in a distinctive light. It’s an arrangement by a window in an October twilight.’

  Borluut looked at the picture and was gradually won over to the point where it touched him. It was something other than a piece of painting, something more. Looking at it, one forgot about

  techniques and, anyway, they were all combined: charcoal with colour highlights, a skilful chemistry of pastels and pencils, of dust and mysterious cross-hatching. It was evening in the picture. As if shadow and silence had been put under glass.

  Bartholomeus went on, ‘I wanted to show that these objects are sensitive, suffer at the coming of night, faint at the departure of the last rays, which, by the way, also live in this room; they suffer as much, they fight against the darkness. There you have it. It’s the life of things, if you like. The French would call it a nature morte , a picture of inanimate objects. That is not what I’m trying to show. Flemish puts it better: a still life.’

  The painter showed him another work. It was a figure, not very large, a priestess-like woman dressed in an ageless garment with, around her, a slenderness of columns, a blossoming of capitals.

  ‘This,’ said Bartholomeus, ‘is Architecture. See, she’s making the gesture of measuring the sky . It’s for the tower that is going to rise up there and which she is pondering.’

  ‘It is admirable, truly admirable,’ Borluut declared in solemn, impassioned tones. ‘But how few will understand you, with that kind of art.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ said Bartholomeus, ‘it is along those lines that I will paint the pictures for the town. The essential thing is to create beauty. First and foremost I work for myself
. What is the point of making things others like if you dislike them yourself?

  It would be like a reprobate having the reputation of being virtuous. Would it make him feel any the less remorseful? The main thing for inner contentment is to be in a state of grace.

  And there is an artistic state of grace, for art is a kind of religion. It has to be loved for itself, for the intoxication and consolation it offers because it is the most noble means of forgetting the world and conquering death.’

  Borluut listened to the painter holding forth, moved by his calm, sonorous voice, which seemed to come from outside time. His wiry black beard jutted out, tapering. Thin and pale, he had one of those profiles burning with the fever of a monk in the act of adoration. The studio around him, the Beguines’ former visiting-room, really did seem like a monastic cell. No luxury. On the walls simply a few scraps of old chasubles, pieces of stoles he had hung up out of a taste for faded tones and also to suggest to himself ancient cathedrals, abolished processions; then reproductions of those Flemish Primitives who, at once meticulous and visionary, were his masters: the altarpieces and triptychs of van Eyck and Memling with nothing but Annunciations, Adorations, Virgins, Christ Childs, angels with rainbow wings, saints playing the organ or the psaltery. And these ancient liturgical silks, these mystical images increased the impression surrounding Bartholomeus of a monkish cell and of an art-religion.

  ‘Besides,’ Bartholomeus concluded, ‘I have always seen the artist in this way, as a kind of priest, a priest of the ideal who must also make a vow of poverty, of chastity…’

  Smiling, he added, ‘Haven’t I remained a bachelor?’

  ‘You have done well,’ Borluut said, suddenly filled with concern.

  ‘What! You approve? And you’ve just got married?’

  ‘Yes and no.’

  ‘You’re not happy?’

  ‘One is never as happy as one thought one would be.’

  ‘That is to say you imagined Barbara was an angel and she’s turned out to be a woman. They’re all more or less temperamental, quick-tempered. Barbara more than any, I would think. She’s Spanish, isn’t she? What’s left of the old blood of the conquest, Catholic and violent, domineering and inquisitorial, takes a certain pleasure in making people suffer. You had no idea, did you? Yet it was obvious. She never even managed to get on with her father and you know how easygoing he is. Don’t you keep your eyes open? You don’t see things very clearly, do you? At one point I thought of putting you on your guard, but you were already in love with her…’

  ‘Yes, I loved her, and I love her still,’ Borluut said. ‘I love her in a strange way, in the only way it’s possible to love that kind of woman. It’s very difficult to analyse, and very variable.

  She’s so changeable herself. Transports of delight, moments of abandon, a yielding, purring tenderness which wraps itself round you, words simply flowing, lips playful – then, the slightest little thing, a word misinterpreted, a delay, a mild criticism, an irritating gesture and disaster strikes. Everything goes blurred, nerves tense and let fly stupid, cruel words, perhaps unintentionally.’

  Borluut stopped, suddenly confused, surprised at his confession, at having said too much. That morning there had been another scene with Barbara, more acrimonious than previous ones, which had filled him with concern about the future. It was so soon after their marriage. Had he perhaps exaggerated? He had spoken under the influence of one very recent experience. All in all, the alarms were rare, a few rainy days in the three months of their life together. It was doubtless inevitable, a law of nature really. Borluut reassured himself, recalled Barbara, her dark beauty, her lips that were so dear to him. He had gone too far in complaining about her. Bartholomeus was to blame for setting him off down that slippery slope. The painter had always been hostile to Barbara, anyway. Who knows, perhaps at some point he had been smitten with her and maybe she had spurned him? Borluut was annoyed at the way he had analysed Barbara and had encouraged him

  to join in maligning her. He was annoyed with Bartholomeus for the way he had confided in him, feeling he had somehow been tricked into it. He was annoyed with himself.

  As he made his way back to his house on the Dijver, along the canals, beside the calm waters, Borluut felt his regret, his remorse at having divulged his worries, grow at the sight of the noble swans, sealed-in snow, which, prisoners of the canals, prey to the rain, the sadness of the bells, the shadow of the gables, have the modesty to remain silent and only complain, with a voice that is almost human, when they are about to die…

  X

  After Barbara’s marriage van Hulle had given up dealing in antiques. He got rid of his old furniture and curios, keeping only the most precious for himself and his home. He reckoned his private income was sufficient to stop having to put up with the disturbance of connoisseurs, visitors to the town who came to his home, looked round, picked up this or that object, holding it with tingling fingertips – that exquisite sensual pleasure of collectors, who are a tactile species – and, more often than not, left without purchasing anything. He was growing old and wanted peace and quiet, at most to continue to entertain Borluut, Bartholomeus and the rest on Monday evenings; but that was just out of habit, he was no longer interested in the Flemish Movement, which he felt had lost its purity and been taken over by the politicians.

  Besides that, his secret – and principal – reason for retiring was to devote himself entirely to his idée fixe , his collection which was becoming ever larger and more complicated. Van Hulle’s concern was no longer simply to have beautiful clocks or rare timepieces; his feelings for them were not simply those one has for inanimate objects. True, their outward appearance was still important, their craftsmanship, their mechanisms, their value as works of art, but the fact that he had collected so many was for a different reason entirely. It was a result of his strange preoccupation with the exact time . It was no longer enough for him that they were interesting. He was irritated by the differences in time they showed. Above all when they struck the hours and the quarters. One, very old, was deranged and got confused in keeping count of the passage of time, which it had been doing for so long. Others were behind, little Empire clocks with children’s voices almost, as if they had not quite grown up.

  In short, the clocks were always at variance. They seemed to be running after each other, calling out, getting lost, looking for each other at all the changing crossroads of time.

  It annoyed van Hulle that they were never in unison. Living together, is it not better to do things together? He would have liked to see them all go the same, that is think the same, think as he did, show the same time, without deviation, from the signal

  he had given. But this accord was a miracle that had so far seemed impossible.

  One might as well hope that all the stones in the sea, which had come from different parts of the horizon and been pushed along by unequal tides, should be identical in volume. Still, he tried. He had taken instruction from a clockmaker and now he was familiar with the wheels, the springs, the delicate teeth and pinions, the jewelled bearings, the chains, all the nerves and muscles, the whole anatomy of this creature of steel and gold whose regular pulse marks out the life of time. He had bought the necessary tools, files, fine saws, tiny instruments with which to dismantle, polish, regulate, correct and cure these delicate, impressionable organisms. Perhaps with observation, patience and meticulousness, putting this one back and bringing that one forward, giving each one the assistance its weakness demanded, he would one day realise his obsessive dream, his idée fixe which had become more precisely defined: finally to see them all in unison, to hear them all, if only once, strike the hour at the same time, while that same hour rang out from the bell-tower. To achieve his ideal of having unified time!

  Van Hulle’s mania persisted, he did not become the least disheartened. He spent whole days in his clock museum, trying to adjust them so they were the same, absorbed in his dream of them showing the identical time, absorbed in the p
leasure of his engrossing forays into clock-repairing. Sitting at his bench, his eyeglass over his eye, he observed the working of the springs, the little ailments of the wheels, the germs that were the fine motes of dust. For him it was as fascinating as conducting experiments in a laboratory.

  Oh the joy of an idée fixe ! The contentment of a life taken up with some ideal, any ideal! A gentle trap to catch the infinite, like the sun in a piece of mirror in a child’s hand.

  The peace and quiet of a house filled with a single dream! Van Hulle was happy, especially after the departure of Barbara, whose moods and bickering resulted in shrill cries that rent the solitude in which the only sound to be heard was the regular heartbeat of the clocks.

  And Godelieve’s heartbeat too. It was so calm! And so in unison with his own, van Hulle thought. That was what had unconsciously led him to dream of the agreement of his clocks. It ought to be achievable for mechanical clockwork, for the passive life of objects since, with Godelieve, he had achieved the much more complicated and mysterious accord of two human beings.

  Even their occupations seemed to be parallel. While he was sorting out the mysterious threads of time, all the gold wires inside the clocks, Godelieve, who was staying at home more and more, was arranging the no less fine and intricate white threads of her lace-making pillow.

  She, too, was bringing them together, combining the innumerable threads in a precise whole – the lace veil which, having become very pious, she had promised to the Virgin in a glass case at the corner of the street where they lived. It would take a long time to finish, but she had the time in her empty life, which already had something of that of an old maid. She was gradually accumulating pieces: a flower, rosettes, an emblem, scattered fragments of the dedicated veil. Was that not also a kind of collection, of successive designs, before the completion of the whole veil?

  Resemblance. Identity! A life together, in which one was the other, simultaneously and alternately. One said what the other was thinking. One saw with the other’s eyes. They understood each other without having to speak. From spending their whole time together, they had become like facing mirrors, each reflecting objects to the other. Van Hulle loved Godelieve with a jealous affection. In the past it had caused him pain, almost physical pain, to think that a man might love her, might embrace her. But above all she was, for him, his own self-awareness. He felt that without her he would be nothing but a dead body.