by Bill Bryson
It didn’t strike me as odd that I was the only passenger to alight at the station, or that the station itself was eerily deserted, until I stepped outside, into that gritty drizzle that hangs perpetually over Brussels, and realized I was in a part of the city I had never seen before: one of those anonymous neighbourhoods where the buildings are grey and every end wall has a three-storey advertisement painted on it and the shops sell things like swimming-pool pumps and signs that say NO PARKING – GARAGE IN CONSTANT USE. I had wanted Bruxelles Centrale and would have settled for the Gare du Nord or the Gare du Midi or even the obscure Gare Josaphat, but this was none of these, and I had no idea where I was. I set my face in a dogged expression and trudged towards what I thought might be the downtown – a hint of tall buildings on a distant, drizzly horizon.
I had been to Brussels a couple of times before and thought I knew the city reasonably well, so I kept telling myself that any minute I would start to recognize things, and sometimes I even said, ‘Say, that looks kind of familiar,’ and would trudge a quarter of a mile to what I thought might be the back of the Palais de Justice but which proved in the event to be a dog-food factory. I walked and walked down long streets that never changed character or even acquired any, just endless blocks of grey sameness, which Brussels seems to possess in greater abundance than almost anywhere else in Europe.
I hate asking directions. I am always afraid that the person I approach will step back and say, ‘You want to go where? The centre of Brussels? Boy, are you lost. This is Lille, you dumb shit,’ then stop other passers-by and say, ‘You wanna hear something classic? Buddy, tell these people where you think you are,’ and that I’ll have to push my way through a crowd of people who are falling about and wiping tears of mirth from their eyes. So I trudged on. Just when I reached the point where I was beginning to think seriously about phoning my wife and asking her to come and find me (‘And listen, honey, bring some Yorkies and the Sunday papers’), I turned a corner and there to my considerable surprise was the Manneken-Pis, the chubby little statue of a naked boy having a pee, the inexpressibly naff symbol of the city, and suddenly I knew where I was and all my little problems melted. I celebrated by buying a Manneken-Pis cake plate and a family-sized Toblerone at one of the 350 souvenir shops that line the street, and felt better still.
Fifteen minutes later, I was in a room at the Hotel Adolphe Sax, lying on the bed with my shoes on (disintegrating into a hermitic slobbiness is one of the incidental pleasures of solitary travel), breaking my teeth on the Toblerone (who invented those things?) and watching some daytime offering on BBCl – a panel discussion involving people who were impotent or from Wolverhampton or suffering some other personal catastrophe, the precise nature of which eludes me now – and in half an hour was feeling sufficiently refreshed to venture out into Brussels.
I always stay in the Sax because it gets BBCl on the TV and because the lifts are so interesting, a consideration that I was reminded of now as I stood in the corridor beside an illuminated Down button, passing the time, as one does, by humming the Waiting for the Elevator Song (‘Doo dee doo dee doo dee doo doo’) and wondering idly why hotel hallway carpet is always so ugly.
Generally speaking, they don’t understand elevators in Europe. Even in the newer buildings the elevators are almost always painfully slow and often lack certain features that are elsewhere considered essential, like an inside door, so that if you absent-mindedly lean forward you are likely to end up with one arm twenty-seven feet longer than the other. But even by these standards the lifts at the Sax are exceptional.
You get in intending to go downstairs for breakfast, but find that the lift descends without instructions past the lobby, past the underground garage and basement and down to an unmarked sub-basement where the doors open briefly to reveal a hall full of steam and toiling coolies. As you fiddle uselessly with the buttons (which are obviously not connected to anything), the doors clang shut and, with a sudden burst of vigour, the elevator shoots upwards to the eleventh floor at a speed that makes your face feel as if it is melting, pauses for a tantalizing half-second, drops ten feet, pauses again and then freefalls to the lobby. You emerge, blood trickling from your ears, and walk with as much dignity as you can muster into the dining-room.
So you can perhaps conceive my relief at finding now that the lift conveyed me to my destination without incident apart from an unscheduled stop at the second floor and a brief, but not unpleasant, return trip to the fourth.
Brussels, it must be said, is not the greatest of cities for venturing. After Paris, it was a relief just to cross a street without feeling as if I had a bull’s-eye painted on my butt, but once you’ve done a couple of circuits of the Grand-Place and looked politely in the windows of one or two of the many thousands of shops selling chocolates or lace (and they appear to sell nothing else in Brussels), you begin to find yourself glancing at your watch and wondering if nine-forty-seven in the morning is too early to start drinking.
I settled instead for another circuit of the Grand-Place. It is fetching, no doubt about it. It is the centrepiece of the city, a nicely proportioned cobbled square surrounded by grand and ornate buildings: the truly monumental Hôtel de Ville and opposite it the only slightly less grand Maison du Roi (which despite its name has never been a royal palace – don’t say you never learned anything from me), all of them linked by narrow, ornately decorated guild houses. The ground floors of these guild houses almost all contain dark, cosy cafés, full of wooden furniture and crackling fires, where you can sit over a coffee or beer and gaze out on this most beguiling of backdrops. Many people seem to spend whole days doing little else.
I opted for De Gulden Boot, even though on a previous visit I had been shamelessly short-changed there by a waiter who mistook me for a common tourist just because I was wearing a Manneken-Pis tracksuit, and I had to put on my severest Don’t-fuck-with-me-Gaston look in order to get my full complement of change. But I don’t bear grudges, except against Richard Nixon, and didn’t hesitate to go in there now. Besides, it’s the nicest café on the square and I believe that a little elegance with a cup of coffee is worth paying for. But watch your change, ladies.
I spent two and a half days seeing the sights – the grand and splendid Musée d’Art Ancien, the Musée d’Art Moderne, the two historical museums in the ponderously named Parc du Cinquantenaire (the museums were a bit ponderous, too), the Musée Horta, and even the gloomy and wholly forgotten Institut des Sciences Naturelles – and in between times just shuffled around among the endless office complexes in a pleasantly vacant state of mind.
Brussels is a seriously ugly place, full of wet litter, boulevards like freeways and muddy building sites. It is a city of grey offices and faceless office workers, the briefcase capital of Europe. It has fewer parks than any city I can think of, and almost no other features to commend it – no castle on a hill, no mountainous cathedral, no street of singularly elegant shops, no backdrop of snowy peaks, no fairy-lighted seafront. It doesn’t even have a river. How can a city not at least have a river? They did once have some city walls, but all that remains is a crumbly fragment stuck next door to a bowling alley on the Rue des Alexiens. The best thing that can be said for Brussels is that it is only three hours from Paris. If I were in charge of the EEC, and frankly you could do worse, my first move would be to transfer the capital to Dublin or Glasgow or possibly Naples, where the jobs would be appreciated and where the people still have some pride in their city, because in Brussels, alas, they simply haven’t.
It would be hard to think of a place that has shown less regard for its heritage. Example: Brussels was home for thirty-five years to the father of art nouveau architecture, Victor Horta, who was so celebrated in his lifetime that they made him a baron – he was to Brussels what Mackintosh was to Glasgow and Gaudi to Barcelona – but even so the sliggardly city authorities over the years allowed developers to demolish almost all his finest buildings: the Anspach Department Store, the Maison du Peuple, th
e Brugmann Hospital, the Roger house. Now there is remarkably little in Brussels worth looking at. You can walk for hours and not see a single sight to lift the heart.
I am assured that things are getting better. It used to be that when you emerged from the central station your first view was looking downhill across the roofs of the old town, and in the very centre of this potentially arresting setting, in the sort of open space into which other cities would have inserted a golden cathedral or baroque town hall, sat a parking lot and gas station. Now both of those have been torn down and some new brick buildings – not brilliant architecturally, but certainly an improvement on the gas station – have been erected in their place, and I was assured again and again by locals that the city government has at last recognized its slack attitude towards development and begun to insist on buildings of some architectural distinction, but the evidence of this so far is rather less than overwhelming.
The one corner of charm in the city is a warren of narrow, pedestrian-only streets behind the Grand-Place called, with a mildly pathetic dash of hyperbole, the Sacred Isle. Here the little lanes and passageways are packed with restaurants and crowds of people wandering around in the happy state of deciding where to eat, nosing around the ice barrows of lobsters, mussels and crayfish that stand outside each establishment. Every doorway issues a warm draught of grilled aromas and every window reveals crowds of people enjoying themselves at almost any hour of the day or night. It is remorselessly picturesque and appealing, and it has been like this since the Middle Ages, and yet even this lovable, clubby little neighbourhood came within an ace of being bulldozed in the 1960s. Wherever you go in Europe, you find yourself wondering what sort of brain-wasting disease it was that affected developers and architects in the 1960s and 70s, but nowhere is this sensation stronger than in Brussels.
Yet Brussels has its virtues. It’s the friendliest big city in Europe (which may or may not have something to do with the fact that a quarter of its residents come from abroad), it has a couple of good museums, the oldest shopping arcade in Europe, the small but pleasurable Galeries St-Hubert, lots of terrific bars and the most wonderful restaurants. Eating out is the national sport in Belgium, and Brussels alone has 1,500 restaurants, twenty-three of them carrying Michelin rosettes. You can eat incredibly well there for less than almost anywhere else on the continent. I dined in the Sacred Isle every night, always trying a new restaurant and always achieving the gustatory equivalent of a multiple orgasm. The restaurants are almost always tiny – to reach a table at the back you have to all but climb over half a dozen diners – and the tables are squeezed so tightly together that you cannot cut your steak without poking your neighbour in the cheek with an elbow or dragging your sleeve through his sauce Béarnaise, but in an odd way that’s part of the enjoyment. You find that you are effectively dining with the people next to you, sharing bread rolls and little pleasantries. This is a novel pleasure for the lone traveller, who usually gets put at the darkest table, next to the gents, and spends his meal watching a procession of strangers pulling up their flies and giving their hands a shake as they pass.
After dinner each night I would go for a necessarily aimless stroll – there is nothing much to aim for – but, like most cities, Brussels is always better at night. I walked one evening up to the massive Palais de Justice, which broods on a small eminence overlooking the old town and looks like an American state capitol building that has been taking steroids. It is absolutely enormous – it covers 280,000 square feet and was the largest building constructed anywhere in the world in the nineteenth century – but the only truly memorable thing about it is its bulk. Another evening, I walked out to the headquarters of the EEC. In a city of buildings so ugly they take your breath away, the headquarters of the EEC at Rond Point Schuman manages to stand out. It was only six o’clock, but there wasn’t a soul about, not a single person working late, which made me think of the old joke: Question: How many people work in the European Commission? Answer: About a third of them. You cannot look at all those long rows of windows without wondering what on earth goes on in there. I suppose there are whole wings devoted to making sure that post-office queues are of a uniform length throughout the community and that a soft-drinks machine in France dispenses the same proportion of upside-down cups as one in Italy.
As an American, it’s interesting to watch the richest countries in Europe enthusiastically ceding their sovereignty to a body that appears to be out of control and answerable to no one. Did you know that because of its Byzantine structure, the European Commission does not even know ‘how many staff members it has or what they all do’? (I quote from The Economist.) I find this worrying. For my part I decided to dislike the EEC when I discovered that they were taking away those smart hardback navy blue British passports and replacing them with flimsy red books that look like the identity papers of a Polish seaman. This is always the problem with large institutions. They have no style.
I don’t know much about how the EEC works, but I do know one interesting fact that I think gives some perspective to its achievements: in 1972 the European Conference on Post and Telecommunications called for a common international telephone code for Common Market nations, namely 00. Since then the various member states have been trying to reach agreement. So far not one of them has adopted the code, but give them another eighteen years and things may start to happen.
6. Belgium
I spent a couple of pleasantly pointless days wandering around Belgium by train. As countries go, Belgium is a curiosity. It’s not one nation at all, but two, northern Dutch-speaking Flanders and southern French-speaking Wallonia. The southern half possesses the most outstanding scenery, the prettiest villages, the best gastronomy and, withal, a Gallic knack for living well, while the north has the finest cities, the most outstanding museums and churches, the ports, the coastal resorts, the bulk of the population and most of the money.
The Flemings can’t stand the Walloons and the Walloons can’t stand the Flemings, but when you talk to them a little you realize that what holds them together is an even deeper disdain for the French and the Dutch. I once walked around Antwerp for a day with a Dutch-speaking local and on every corner he would indicate to me with sliding eyes some innocent-looking couple and mutter disgustedly under his breath, ‘Dutch.’ He was astonished that I couldn’t tell the difference between a Dutch person and a Fleming.
When pressed on their objections, the Flemings become a trifle vague. The most common complaint I heard was that the Dutch drop in unannounced at mealtimes and never bring gifts. ‘Ah, like our own dear Scots,’ I would say.
I learned much of this in Antwerp, where I stopped for an afternoon to see the cathedral and stayed on into the evening wandering among the many bars, which must be about the finest and most numerous in Europe: small, smoky places, as snug as Nigel Lawson’s waistcoat, full of dark panelling and dim yellowy light and always crowded with bright, happy-looking people having a good time. It is an easy city in which to strike up conversations because the people are so open and their English is nearly always perfect. I talked for an hour to two young street sweepers who had stopped for a drink on their way home. Where else but northern Europe could an outsider talk to street sweepers in his own tongue?
It struck me again and again how much they know about us and how little we know about them. You could read the English newspapers for months, and the American newspapers for ever, and never see a single article about Belgium, and yet interesting things happen there.
Consider the Gang of Nijvel. This was a terrorist group which for a short period in the mid-1980s roamed the country (to the extent that it is possible to roam in Belgium) and from time to time would burst into supermarkets or crowded restaurants and spray the room with gunfire, killing at random – women, children, anyone who happened to be in the way. Having left bodies everywhere, the gang would take a relatively small sum of money from the tills and disappear into the night. The strange thing is this: the gang never revealed
its motives, never took hostages, never stole more than a few hundred pounds. It didn’t even have a name that anyone knew. The Gang of Nijvel label was pinned on it by the press because its getaway cars were always Volkswagen GTi’s stolen from somewhere in the Brussels suburb of Nijvel. After about six months the attacks abruptly stopped and have never been resumed. The gunmen were not caught, their weapons were never found, the police haven’t the faintest idea who they were or what they wanted. Now is that strange or what? And yet you probably never read about it in your paper. I think that’s pretty strange or what, too.
I went to Bruges for a day. It’s only thirty miles from Brussels and so beautiful, so deeply, endlessly gorgeous, that it’s hard to believe it could be in the same country. Everything about it is perfect – its cobbled streets, its placid bottle-green canals, its steep-roofed medieval houses, its market squares, its slumbering parks, everything. No city has been better favoured by decline. For 200 years Bruges – I don’t know why we persist in calling it this because to the locals it’s spelled Brugge and pronounced ‘Brooguh’ – was the most prosperous city in Europe, but the silting-up of the River Zwyn and changing political circumstances made it literally a backwater, and for 500 years, while other cities grew and were endlessly transformed, Bruges remained forgotten and untouched. When Wordsworth visited in the nineteenth century he found grass growing in the streets. Antwerp, I’ve been told, was more beautiful still, even as late as the turn of this century, but developers moved in and pulled down everything they could get their hands on, which was pretty much everything. Bruges was saved by its obscurity.
It is a rare place. I walked for a day with my mouth open. I looked in at the Groeninge Museum and visited the beguinage, its courtyard lawns swimming in daffodils, but mostly I just walked the streets, agog at such a concentration of perfection. Even the size of the place was perfect – big enough to be a city, to have bookstores and interesting restaurants, but compact enough to feel contained and friendly. You could walk every street within its encircling canal in a day or so. I did just that and never once saw a street I wouldn’t want to live on, a pub I wouldn’t like to get to know, a view I wouldn’t wish to call my own. It was hard to accept that it was real – that people came home to these houses every night and shopped in these shops and walked their dogs on these streets and went through life thinking that this is the way of the world. They must go into a deep reverberating shock when they first see Brussels.