up anything again?’ he asked. ‘Archaism’s absurd, in history as in art.’
Farazyn refused to let his optimism be shaken. ‘The plans have already been lodged, a combination of financial backers has been promised. And the state will play its part. We will succeed.’
‘I very much doubt it,’ said Borluut. ‘But in the meantime you will have ruined the town, destroyed what is left of the old districts, the precious façades, for your futile installations.
Oh, if only Bruges could understand its vocation.’
Borluut went on to sketch out that vocation, as he conceived it.
‘But does the town itself not understand it? The stagnant waters have given up; the towers cast long enough shadows; the inhabitants are sufficiently taciturn and stay-at-home.’
All they had to do was to keep on going in the same direction, restore the palaces and houses, let the bell-towers stand out from other buildings, embellish the churches, elaborate its mystical quality, enlarge the museums.
‘That’s the truth!’ Bartholomeus broke in. He always emerged from his cool reserve in sudden bursts. Each time it was like a fountain in winter, thawing then quivering and suddenly soaring up in a long jet.
‘Yes, Borluut’s right,’ he said. ‘Here art is in the air. It rules over the old houses. We must augment it, revive the literary societies, bring together spectacles like those old popular processions, the Ommegancks . And pictures! Our Flemish Primitives, for example. This is the only place where they ought to be viewed. It’s only in Bruges that they can be understood.
Imagine the town putting its gold and its energy into purchasing all the van Eycks and Memlings there are in the country. There’s a use for your funds, Farazyn, if you get some. That will be far more beautiful than digging a canal and docks, shifting earth and stones. It would mean we would possess that divine Adoration of the Lamb with the angels clothed in clouds and, in the grass in the foreground, tiny flowers that form an unheard-of garden of precious stones. We’d also have that Adam and, above all, that Eve , whom the old master, in an extraordinary flash of genius, painted naked and pregnant, truly the mother of the human race.
What a treasure it would be for Bruges, unequalled anywhere else in the world. That is what would make the town beautiful, resplendent, and would make people everywhere keen to come and see it. Look at the way even the little museum in the Hospital of St John and the shrine of St Ursula attract visitors.
Farazyn, annoyed at the cold reception of his project and the opposition it had aroused, said nothing more.
The others fell into an intimate silence in which they felt in agreement, dreaming of the same future for Bruges: pious souls
would come now and then for a retreat in one of its convents; for those with artistic souls it would be a secular retreat, with the preaching of the bells and the exposition of the relics of a great past.
Following that evening at van Hulle’s with Farazyn’s announcement of the ‘Seaport-of-Bruges’ project, Borluut felt impelled to find out in detail how Bruges had been abandoned by the sea. A sudden betrayal! It was like being forsaken by one’s great love. It had left the town forever sad, widowed, so to speak.
He searched the archives, looked at old maps, those of Marcus Gheeraerts and others, which showed the old communicating canal.
But the earlier ones were missing, those which would have shown the North Sea close to the town, at Damme, which had been washed by the tides. Later they only reached Sluis; then the river silted up progressively, the sea withdrawing so that in its turn Sluis was repudiated, left in the middle of dry land. This change in the tides happened very quickly, in less than a century.
Gradually all that part known as the Zwijn, which was originally an arm of the sea reaching into Flanders, filled in. The line could still be seen, a vast corridor of sand coming in from the coast, where the sea now stops.
One day Borluut went to see the dead river-mouth.
Everything was intact, preserving the shape of the past, as the mounds over the graves in country churchyards keep the shape of the body. Even the dunes open out on either side, no longer facing the sea but turning inland in parallel curves, like the remaining banks of a vanished watercourse. It was immensely wide, testimony to the fact that it had been an arm of the sea where the seventeen hundred ships of Philip Augustus performed their manoeuvres. It was here that the neat sailing ships, the schooners, the brigantines with painted poops came in on the tide carrying goods to the town: wool from England, furs from Hungary, wine from France and silks and perfumes from the Orient.
Long ago the place was famous all over the world. Borluut recalled that Dante himself had mentioned it in his Inferno: Quali i Fiamminghi tra Cazzante e Bruggia, Temendo ’l flotto che inver lor s’avventa, Fanno lo schermo, perche ’l mar si fuggia.
(Just as the Flemings, ’twixt Cadzand and Bruges,/ Fearing the tide that rushes towards them,/ Raised up a dyke to turn back the sea.)
It is in Canto XV where he describes the sands of the seventh circle surrounded by the stream of tears.
It occurred to Borluut that the canals of the towns here, abandoned by the sea, were also streams of tears, not only in Bruges, but in Damme and in Sluis, which he had passed through that morning on his way, a poor little dead town where he had seen one single vessel in the docks, giving it the illusion it was still a port. As for Dante’s sands, he found them too in the dunes that had piled up. What an austere landscape! Borluut was alone, with nothing but the sky and water. No footsteps, apart from his own, marked the immense expanse, the white desert which this ancient outer harbour of Bruges now was.
It was an infinitely desolate spot, above all because of the dunes, the chain of lifeless hills of sand so fine it could have been filtered through the hourglass of the centuries. Some were clothed in a sparse grassy fleece, mangy green fur ceaselessly trembling as if afraid the time of shearing had come. But their melancholy appealed to Borluut. He had those eyes of the North which like to reflect things which are already motionless. And, above all, he saw an image of himself in them: a great torment that has subsided, a heart in turmoil that has resigned itself to severe, monotonous lines.
He sought counsel in this great calm, came to a deeper sense of the vanity of the world and of himself and his troubles as he contemplated the sandy hummocks aligned like enormous tombs, the tombs of towns killed by being forsaken by the sea. This sea, close beside him, stretched out limitlessly, a tragic sea, as variable in colour as in mood.
Borluut had often surmised its presence from fleeting glimpses caught at the top of the belfry while he was daydreaming after the carillon was finished. It could not be made out clearly because of the mist constantly woven into the air, the grey gauze that floats there and from which only the bell-towers divest themselves. However, as the sun sank, one could infer it from a shimmer, a gleam at the bottom of the sky…
Now Borluut was seeing it from close to. And to its very end, it seemed, from the way the line of the horizon merged into the infinite. It was bare. Not one ship. It ground out a dirge, in a glaucous tone, opaque, uniform. One sensed that all the colours were below, but faded. At the edge, the waves spilling onto the shore made a sound of washerwomen beating sheets of white linen, a whole supply of shrouds for future storms.
Borluut spent a long time walking across this solitary expanse, which was like the end of a continent. No traces of human beings.
From time to time a gull screeched like a pulley-wheel.
He felt more cheerful, revived by the journey, released from himself and his poor life, uplifted by thoughts of the infinite.
While he had spent his time lingering there, the tide had come in, sweeping across the beach, softening it, soaking the arid heart of the sand in a flood of tears breaking over it. The swell
came from the open sea, dribbled a brief line of foam, seemed bound to continue its charge, generating itself from within – but it suddenly stopped at a precise limit, which was never crossed,
a band along the beach fringed with a heap of shells, marked out with a border of glass trinkets. Beyond that the sand was compacted, it felt as if it was centuries old. No tide had ever reached it. That day’s stopped too, just in time. No wave brought refreshment to the sepulchre of the ancient arm of the sea, dried up and dead beyond recall. The corridor of white sand remained empty and bare.
The town of Sluis was still there however, very close; the bell-tower could be seen, emerging from the trees, which the setting sun made seem more immense.
No matter. Henceforth the sea stopped and would go no further.
The sea is changeable. It loves some towns, then leaves them, going to kiss others on the opposite side of the horizon. That is the way it is, we just have to put up with it, accept it. Are we going to run after the sea? Do we think we can tame it, bring it back, get it to mend its ways like a flighty mistress?
Here Borluut got a better sense of the obscure event that had been the ruin of Bruges. How absurd the ‘Seaport-of-Bruges’
project appeared to him now, seeing the Zwijn and what the past had been here, recreating the old drama of the sea. Was Farazyn the man, with his artificial waterway, to correct the monumental caprice of the element, its submarine will, its frenzied passion?
As for Borluut, his mind was made up: that day he had seen History, had lived History.
XIII
One Monday, after the customary soirée at van Hulle’s, Farazyn accompanied Borluut as he made his way home. They dawdled, strolling aimlessly, carried along by the pleasure of chatting together, wandering along the canals. There was a slight mist in the air, casting a faint spell over the nocturnal town. From time to time the moon shone clear, creating a silvery chiaroscuro. And how enchanting suddenly to see the moon facing the moon in the water!
Together in the deserted shadows, Borluut and Farazyn, old friends, felt very close. They rekindled their shared past, distant memories, their initial patriotic fervour, which that evening at van Hulle’s had shown to be slowly weakening. The soirée had been a melancholy one.
There had been little conversation. The words dragged, with a silence between each like the silence between bells striking. If the bells are sorrowful, it is less because of their mournful sound than because of the silence which follows, one of those long silences in which the sound dies away, sinks into eternity…
The great days of the Movement seemed past. Van Hulle, who had been the prime mover, in good times and bad, was undoubtedly growing old. He seemed uninterested in the world outside, leaning more towards private and secret pleasures. As for Bartholomeus, he had only joined them out of rancour, because the Flemish Movement, which had something of a conspiracy about it, served to express his own frustration at seeing his talent unemployed. Now that he had been commissioned to produce the decorative painting for the town, he was appeased, once more full of joy in his work and his mystic cult of art.
Even Farazyn, usually so loquacious, so impassioned, no longer spoke much, attending the evenings more out of habit.
‘I just go to see Godelieve,’ he told Borluut as they walked home.
Borluut said nothing.
‘She’s so delightful to look at.’ And, with evident enjoyment, he went on to describe her, her ash-blond hair, her pensive smile, the pretty little movements of her hands playing with the bobbins as she made her lace; he evoked her whole being, his words creating a luminous presence in the night-time dark of Bruges where they were strolling.
Borluut listened, somewhat surprised, eventually amazed. He began to understand. Why had he not guessed during those Monday evenings? Surely there must have been glances, tones of voice, nuances in the way they said farewell and shook hands that ought to have led him to suspect what was now becoming apparent. He really was not very perceptive. His sensibility lacked antennae.
He never saw things coming, only became aware the moment they were there right in front of him.
So the Gothic charm of Godelieve had worked; without words, certainly, just as the charm of a landscape works. That was the kind of impression she made, calm and profound. You looked at her in the same way as you looked at the horizon. To be honest, it was strange that her charm had worked on Farazyn, who was an outgoing, impassioned type, who liked to take centre stage, make a noise, dominate.
Is it true that love springs from the attraction of opposites?
But, in the first place, did Farazyn really love Godelieve, or was what he felt merely a fleeting disturbance, an emotion that had plucked lightly at his heartstrings from having spent too much time observing her that evening, a momentary upsurge of feeling that would have no further consequences?
However, Farazyn had continued to enumerate her innumerable charms, concluding, ‘She would make a delightful wife.’
‘I don’t think she’ll ever get married,’ said Borluut.
‘Why?’
‘In the first place, because it would make her father too sad.’
‘I know,’ Farazyn replied. ‘He adores her, cossets her like a little child almost. Poor old fellow.’
‘Yes, no one can approach her. She never goes out without him accompanying her. At home he’s always at her side. They’re like each other’s shadows.’
‘No matter,’ said Farazyn. ‘She must dream of a different life.’
Then he dropped his mask and confided in Borluut. He liked Godelieve immensely and was thinking of marrying her. For a long time now he had been trying to make his sentiments known to her, but what was a glance of avowal, an expressive look, a squeeze of the hand in a handshake? Feeble signs! Especially since Godelieve always had a vacant look, her eyes elsewhere, eyes that constantly had to be brought back to the conversation.
In order to be more explicit, he had tried to see her alone for a moment, when he came for the Monday soirées, either by arriving early or by being the last to leave. But van Hulle, jealous guardian of his treasure, never left her.
Farazyn suggested that Borluut should collude with him. It would be nice for them to be linked by family ties, and useful as well from the point of view of their influence on the direction of the Movement. For example Borluut could invite Godelieve – alone –
for lunch one Sunday. Farazyn would be invited as well. And after the meal they would be left alone for a while, as if by chance.
The meal was arranged in accordance with the friends’ plot. The old antiquary had grumbled, but since he was none too steady on his legs and concerned about his health during those harsh and snowy winter months, for once he had to give up the idea of accompanying Godelieve. The meal was by no means a dull affair.
The table sparkled with the glitter of silver and crystal. Each one of them seemed to have overcome their own heartache. They were all in festive mood. Farazyn spoke a lot, elegantly, forcefully, profusely, with an ebb and flow of ideas which he cunningly channelled into gentle waves that washed round Godelieve. He spoke of life, of men’s struggles, and of love, which provided respite for them, a staging post on their journey through life, an inn full of smiles and tender care. Barbara joined in with lively, if slightly sceptical, comments on happiness, on the importance of passion. Farazyn stuck to his guns and argued, in fiery, flowery speech, the rather facile and showy eloquence which he brought to everything he said, empty phrases, iridescent bubbles with which he juggled tirelessly, inexhaustibly.
Godelieve remained inscrutable.
Once the coffee had been served, Barbara made some excuse to leave the room. After a few minutes Joris joined her.
When, one hour later, they returned, twilight was already filling the spacious dining room. The short days of these northern winters!
Godelieve and Farazyn were still sitting in the same places.
Neither of them had moved. Barbara realised immediately there could not possibly have been any closeness between them. Their words had not come together for one moment. They had made conversation from either side of the table, as if from two sides of a river that could not be cros
sed. Evening came, hastened by the heavy curtains draping the windows. Darkness descended on the room, descended on them. The end of the day and the end of love!
They did not bother to light the lamps, as if it were better to make the half-light appear the cause of the half-silence of a conversation that followed a disaster and could not pick up again.
Soon Farazyn rose and said farewell, slightly embarrassed, unseated from the prancing steed of his fine self-assurance.
As soon as he had left, Barbara darted over to Godelieve, snapping, ‘You refused him?’
‘What?’
‘Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. You refused him. I thought you would!’
Godelieve seemed unmoved. She replied in her gentle voice, ‘I have no wish to get married.’
Then she added, with the slightest touch of reproach, at most a shadow, the reflection of a cloud, in her luminous voice,
‘Moreover, I think you might have warned me, asked me beforehand.’
At once Barbara openly expressed her annoyance.
Godelieve hesitated to reply. It was only after a pause that she declared, ‘I prefer to stay with our father.’
The italics were in her voice. Barbara, quick to take offence, saw it as irony directed at her. Immediately she vented her anger. ‘You’re being absurd! Our father! No doubt you’re insinuating you’re the only one who loves him. Oh yes, you and your mawkish ways.’
The discussion was becoming more and more acrimonious. Eventually Godelieve said nothing more. Joris tried to intervene, to put in some calming words. Barbara turned on him. ‘Are you going to lay the blame on me now? You’re the one who invited them.’
Barbara was restless, standing up, sitting down, pacing round the room. It was a monologue in which she gave vent to complaints, grievances, her regret at the failure of such an excellent plan, and cast angry reproaches at Joris, at Godelieve, who sat there in silence, as if they had come round to her point of view.
She turned to Joris. ‘Come on, say something. Persuade her. You tell her she’s being unreasonable too.’
The Bells of Bruges Page 9