The Dedalus Book of Dutch Fantasy

by Richard Huijing

  9

  From his white-folded clothes he showed me his hands and they now contained heavy-burgeoning red, bleeding stigmata. Recoiling from him, horror struck, all shock, I saw them.

  The torpid, tepid blood dripped down broadly. He said: 'Because I suffer intensely. for your errant badness, my painful wounds of the cross have bled open again ... and never will they close for ever until no man errs and suffers.'

  I looked behind me, believing I heard the sound of Soton's finesweet laugh, but he was not yet back in the chamber. I, calm with shock, said cruelly to the bleeding one: 'Show your splendid wounds of the cross to whomever you wish ... but do not demand belief from me, belief that you have suffered on the cross. You enjoyed it so, a fine, nervous enjoyment ... don't you know that torment is the finest pleasure? Don't you know that?'

  'That is my fiercest suffering ... such blind erring ... there is no remedy for it ... my hands bleed for it.'

  'That, too, gives you joyous pain ... and the nuns who in white cloisters kneel around those red images of you, they enjoy it in their own way ... don't you know anything then, about the connection between love and cruelty ... and between religion and cruelty?'

  'I only know the suffering of mankind ... and I suffer because of it.'

  'Then Soton was right after all, that yours is a charming mediocrity ... and that because of this so many people venerate you.'

  He did not answer this discourse and I lashed him further with my mock-making words: 'And the poets who sing of your socalled suffering: do you think that they feel anything other than pleasure at your finely-coloured death? I know one ... in Amsterdam ... he has made many very admiring verses about you ... and he has the walls in his dwelling hung full with images of you ... this gives his body sufficient sating. And I assure you that in this manner you are being used by quite a few more people ... this is apparently not in conflict with any of the three vows ..

  'Not those words ... but your foolish erring pains me ... I forgive you. . .'

  'Of course you forgive me ... that's your job ... better not to make so much of it, I should say ... do I make much of the fact that I do not forgive, not ever ... though the latter is surely the better disposition. . .'

  10

  He got up and he said: I must make haste now, and alas I cannot do anything for you ... I give you my forgiveness and my sincerest blessing.'

  He approached me ... he stretched out his hands, the bleeding ones, above my head. I hated his loving humaneness, while I feared most terribly that he would soil my dark-tressed head I loved so well with his tepid blood. Dizzy with hatred my fingers gripped his wrists and I wildly wrenched his red hands downwards so the joints crunched. He moaned with pain but I did not spare him. In tepid streams his stigmata bled more rapidly under the cramped grip of my fingers.

  I forgive you ... it is not this blood that flows away that pains me ... but your erring does so ... how is Our Father to forgive you this ..

  Rage over his forgiveness turned my eyes red, the blood was raging in my ears. Then, wildly, I broke his stance ... twisting his arms, pushing him over backwards so that he sank down, miserable in the dripping blood. I mated him with the rage of my lithe body that jerked over his and humiliated him. And thus I violated him, with hands that flailed; with feet that trod down; with tremulous mouth full of fine-marauding little teeth that tugged at flesh beneath thin-white clothing. He did not defend himself.

  Then sadness and tiredness came over me from this wild, furious union. My overwrought body lay on his, powerless. My eyes touched upon the still-deep gaze of his own, dark and benevolent. And I hated him for his love of humanity.

  11

  After I had regained consciousness, I saw the dark-deep eyes of the Devil gleam down in mine. He had laid down my body close to his so that I heard the blood-beat of his heart. Timidly I looked around the chamber. 'No,' said Soton, 'he has gone and his filthy blood has been cleared up ... be calm.'

  'Do I never have to see him again? I don't ever want to see him again ... I hate him so much.'

  'No, Heleen, now he will leave you in peace ... not because you have beaten him so and bitten him ... his profession is to be tortured in public really ... but in private like that, this he quite likes too ... but he does see that you remain loyal to me, no matter what ... I am so pleased about that.'

  'At first I didn't ... I was faithless ... do you actually know that?'

  'Yes, my boy, I know ... I stayed in communion with the two of you ... and at first I was indeed afraid ... he is so easy and so unremarkable, and with that he has so much influence...'

  'I did love him in the past . .

  'You see, Heleen, people live and think in tribes ... they have fatherlands ... you have to stay out of all those ... only live and think ... despise all fatherlands ... don't be meek in life and don't be charitable ... then you'll see what beauty you will find ... do you know, my boy, that you must be everything yourself?'

  I looked into his eyes and listened to the ecstasy of his voice. He laughed. Trembling, sobbing, I knew that my happiness was approaching.

  The Devil bent forward, his mouth down to my he kissed me, and he called me: 'darling'.

  Fritzi Harmsen van Beek

  As we were getting in, we hadn't noticed that there was a taxi-pig in the car, along for the ride as well. And it's questionable whether we would have said anything about it, had we noticed.

  Not very likely, to be honest.

  For a start, it's not really advisable, before placing one's life in another's hands, to embark on comments which the driver of such a vehicle might take to be unpleasant. Such a taxi-pig might easily be his friend or, even worse, his little lady wife he had been forced to drag along everywhere from sheer necessity. But even the one who is prepared to take such a risk is left with another difficulty, is left sitting there, gob shut, often until death follows - or else maimed for life, in any case. For how, for god's sake, does one recognise a taxi-pig before the driver has started the car?

  Am I right, or am I right? An impossibility: as long as no driving is being done, it is not to be recognised, and as long as it cannot be recognised one can hardly come trotting out with objections. There's the rub.

  Imagine you said, - Hold on, mate, slowly does it, please. Before we set off, what's that pink little animal down there in the front; not a taxi-pig by any chance, is it? - and the chap says how COULD you say such a thing, that's my own ... (you name it) and if you don't like it, you'd better take the bus, - so that, from a feeling of self-worth, you're obliged to get out and make the journey by public transport in the random company of eighty-five other pigs, and later on you then hear from others who were less prone to flying off the handle that it WASN'T even a taxi-pig: it was quite simply the peasant's brother! There's you looking goggle-eyed when you're just returning, right brainwashed and almost beyond repair, from the local transport corporations. Such things, too, are irreparable.

  But the taxi-pig I'm talking about right now: we hadn't noticed it. The notion that it was simply sitting in, somewhere in the front, of course, this had not entered our heads because we were far too busy with ourselves and with the beavers.

  Those beavers: having to set out on a journey with them is no joke. It had been for their sakes, more or less, that we had conceived the plan of going IN COGNITO, so there we were, all four in the back: the two of them together, clearly recognisable, and we, as if nothing was up, in our shoddy disguises. And the driver did look old-fashioned for a moment, but even if he did cotton on, he never showed that at all.

  - And that's how it should be, we even thought, with that stupid smugness which, on the whole, leads you to sail, eyes skinned, head-on into disasteration.

  Our wayfaring began at once. Bawled out by preposterous crows, we travelled in stately slow-motion down the garden path, crunching the sparse gravel festively beneath our huge wheels, triumphantly leaving behind a clear and meaningful little chain of deadly exhaust-fume-clouds in our knife-sh
arp wake. The day was wintry. And of a similar colour - that colour of gravely isolated, insufferable, stale bread - were heaven and earth that day: skies snow-blending with fields, their differences only feebly shored up by some black stick-and-branch-work.

  There we were, travelling quite busily from the word go, really: leering, refined and brain-dead by turns, sideways at the not particularly varied perspective behind the car-door windows, and then again staring, wam-bam, narrowly past the back of the remarkably detailed head of the driver, on to the road ahead of us, at the vanishing point ever-running out ahead of us: that head start in the snow, never to be caught up with, and at the vague whiteness of the stretch still to be covered which, meanwhile, passing immediately beneath us, was already being covered in elegant gulleys of sludge and muck.

  So ambiguous, so elevated and yet vulgar at the same time, so full of mysterious contradictions, shifting inconspicuously - when all goes well and everything happens without travel.

  It's quite certain we had already gained speed alarmingly when, in the first bend to the right, sliding like greased lightning across the imitation leather, we were slammed into the car door on the left and we began to shout - Hey, you; and the taxi-pig suddenly said - Yeah, sure. No more than that. Just this: yeah, sure. In a neutral tone of voice, it is true, but incontrovertibly pig-like.

  From fright, we forgot we had those beavers and were IN COGNITO and had to keep our traps shut if we were not to have fingers pointing at us, in all the villages and God-knows-whereelse, throughout the entire region even, as being debauched halfwits; for, once a rumour like that spreads then there's no stopping it - and we burst forth in unholy ranting and raving.

  And then that cunning, incomparable taxi-pig!

  It sat there, motionless, and kept on driving, even gave proceedings an extra dose of the accelerator, and kept its gob shut until we'd shot our bolts and, unpleasant and delicate, went and sat in silence and already began to worry about what the catastrophic consequences of that gasket-blowing might be, and even began to feel like saying - Ah, well; and - Come, come; and more of the like, not so much out of shame or regret, but only to salvage the salvageable.

  Then it went and sat staring out ahead of itself, inscrutable, mumbling so we couldn't make out a thing and we finally ended up saying - Hey; - What; and then, at last, it could point out its specially prepared party-piece to us: mounted, clearly visible, on the dashboard, a nameplate which in white little capitals read BACKSEATDRIVING?NOTHANKS! - that hurtful, hurtful pig.

  There, now: it finally had us where it wanted us.

  Marcus Heeresma

  Thudding and jarring on its shock absorbers, the man in the immaculate, off-white, three-piece suit steers the large car through a gradually narrowing network of unlit, unmetalled streets with open sewers and crooked, tumbledown hovels. The man appears immune to the penetrating stench of garbage and excrement. And yet it must be here, he thinks. It had been explained to him, more or less, at the club, after all. Again: respectable people, all of them. Here too, in Peru, things were going to suit him just fine.

  The man in off-white works fora European government which flogs all kinds of things for which no market can be found elsewhere any more: for lack of parts, because of faulty materials or defects in an even broader sense, but for which an application can be found even now, here or in other so-called third-world countries, or for which applications can be created and such 'creations' must simply be endured. They're quite simply forced to, the man thinks, smiling. On pain of being denied the monies set at their disposal by the delivering country, monies, gathered in by the taxpayers of those countries and earmarked in principle for all kinds of idealistic purposes often viewed by others, however, as being impractical. And these monies are often used largely to finance those 'creations' therefore, and to finance the people on the spot who have to keep the markets open a bit. Ah yes, indeed: business. Many Latin-American countries, once a year, for goodwill too, sell a war criminal from stock and for a great deal of money. That's the way it should be, too, all this.

  The man has been here some seven months by now, and trips such as these have already obliged him a few times to replace the shock absorbers on his car. But it's worth it no end. And money no object, of course. At the club, somebody had called him 'one of the dump-mongers' but, well, the man had been tiddly and, roaring with laughter, had declared to be dealing in waste himself, too. 'These countries are dumping grounds, after all.' And yet, you need to be careful where you shout such things about the place. 'Garbage,' the man in off-white mumbles. A glass and a bottle stand in a holder fixed to the dashboard and the man pours himself a drink.

  Rats, children, pets, the prematurely elderly, people with drab dog-skin shoot away in the dancing floodlight of the heaving car manoeuvring its way round the deepest potholes. Hours of driving through darkness and stench in the damp, hot Lima night have strung themselves into one until finally the network of stinking mayhem runs into a dead-end on one of the many garbage tips of the Peruvian capital - in the night, according to the man, that trembles sultrily with heat and impending manslaughter.

  He shivers and smiles. The car has been fitted with armoured glass. Circumspectly, the man in off-white drives the jolting car along the edge of the rubbish-tip tillage and stops. Only with a tank or some such, on caterpillar tracks, might you be able to go any further, or on tow or pushed by something similar. The strong beam from the searchlight, operated from inside, on the roof of the car, sweeps in all directions across the immense plain of filth. This excites the man. It's a form of malicious pleasure, one that strikes him as erotic: one he is entitled to. Malicious pleasure is quality pleasure and he works hard enough for it in South America: has been doing so for years now. It's made him grow up - and made him important. This, too, is again a beautiful South American country, but hard, gruesomely hard and cruel. However, one has to adapt if one wishes to survive and amuse oneself a little. Malicious pleasure indeed. Why not? If they're too lazy to work, they're good enough to be used.

  The man in off-white has taken good care not to come to a halt in a pothole. Not on the edge of that rubbish tip either. No police come here. They are powerless, for the people do not mind being shot dead. People live so close to death here, continually ... And a revolver and an automatic pistol make for excellent sources of income to desperados. A comfortable old age. A kingdom. Were he to get stranded here, no one would ever hear of him again. 'Anarchist rabble.' But then, they belong on a rubbish tip. Garbage.

  It's the same as with all those other garbage tips where, particularly at night, he has spent so much time. Dumping grounds as far as the light - and, so he presumes, the horizon - will reach: filth, garbage. Exciting. It continues to enchant him. Here, too, it's busy again. Day and night, thousands are at it there. The man in white switches off the searchlight. For a moment it is pitch black. Then his eyes have got used to the rather light night. Like a leering cayman, the car stands on the shore's edge of the immense sea of garbage.

  The man winds up the windows tight shut against the asphyxiating stench and the dangerous gasses that develop spontaneously deep down in that garbage and are forced up to the surface by the pressure. But still the car slowly fills with that stench, that gas and that heat. On the car's bodywork rattle the index-finger long, fat, armour-plated cucarachas, the cockroaches. The tough, excretasucking, bacteria-carrying spreaders of disease that also can fly. They wrench their way in through the holes in the bottom of the car, next to the pedals.

  The man - carefully, with an eye to the crease in his trousers - draws up his legs on to the seat. He has brought along a hammer for those creeps, to protect his white, bespoke, fine-meshed tropical shoes. A hammer with a fist-size head. Such an instrument can always come in handy in these regions, for that matter. The creatures' wing-cases snap, hard, like mica, when he smashes them beneath a hammer blow. The man resolves not to forget to have the girl or the gardener clean the car on the inside as well, tomorrow. They've be
en lucky with staff, as it happens. But then, they're well looked after. At times, to everyone's satisfaction, they are paid in kind, the gardener in jeans the man in white can no longer wear and T-shirts with, to the gardener, foreign-language inscriptions which he walks around in, peacock-proud. The girl receives all kinds of garments from the woman: garden robes, slacks, and the girl is especially pleased with the European underwear which only needs to be taken in a bit for the little, fifteenyear-old Cholo girl the man regularly relaxes with. The man thinks it rather exciting and piquant, actually, to have the little one in his bed in the reduced underwear of his spouse.

  All of a sudden, he shivers. Like a child belonging to him, a cucaracha has attached itself to his upper leg. With the hammer, he shoves the creature from his leg on to the floor where he bashes it to death. The heat and the stench are almost unbearable and the rattling of the cucarachas on the paintwork, the floor and the leather upholstery of the car's seats make him itch everywhere. He takes a deodorant spray from the glove compartment. The spraying does not help much. Many in Peru, the man knows, believe that the enormous clouds of poison gas that form deep down in the dumping grounds probably constitute the greatest disaster threaten ing the inhabited areas. The cities in particular, of course. Lima most of all, the capital with a population numbering eight million, the one to which all paupers, bereft, swarm as a last resort, the serranos in particular, the farmers from the mountains, to pauperise in an even shabbier fashion after having served as voting fodder. On, towards an even quicker death, for it is said that the serranos are not resistant to Lima's damp climate which, moreover, is poisonous in the places where they dwell. The man in off-white shrugs his shoulders. Stupid to come here, in that case.