Rituals (12 page)

"Wow," she said. And then, "How old are you?"

He could see the handwriting in which she would enter it in her diary (no, you oaf, they don't keep diaries these days) and said, "Forty-five." It was the first thing that came into his head.

"I've never been with anyone as old as that."

Records — that was another thing they suffered from. But you could hardly blame them.

"You'd better not make a habit of it."

"I quite liked it."

An immense languor flowed through his body, but he got up. She rolled a cigarette.

"You want one?"

"No thanks."

He washed by the washstand and knew she was not looking at him. He dressed. Summer, it was soon over. Life was a happening.

"Where are you going?"

"I have to meet a friend."

It was true. He had arranged to see Bernard Roozenboom. Bernard was in his fifties. Together they were almost a hundred. Did they still call that friends at her age? He went to the bed, knelt beside her, and caressed her face.

"Shall I see you again sometime?" he asked.

"No. I have a boyfriend."

"I see." He got up. Not too quickly, because of the occasion, and not too slowly, so as not to seem too old. Then he walked out of the room on tiptoe — he did not know why but suspected the worst (my little daughter is asleep). Bye. Bye.

Not until he was several blocks away did it occur to him that neither of them had asked the other's name. He stopped and looked at a window display of electrical goods. Irons and orange squeezers stared back at him. What were names, anyway? What difference would it have made to this episode if he had known her name? None, and yet he felt there was something wrong with an age in which you could go namelessly to bed with someone. But then you've never thought otherwise, he said aloud to himself, and returned to his earlier thought: What are names? Arrangements of letters that, when you pronounce them, form a word by which you can somehow address or refer to a person. Usually these shorter or longer arrangements had distant roots in the Bible or in church history and were therefore connected, in ways that had become obscure to almost everyone, with human beings who had really lived once, which made it all the more mysterious. That you did not choose your own name was arbitrary enough, but suppose that on reaching adulthood you could, in the manner of the Anabaptists, choose a name for yourself. To what extent would you then
be
that name? He read the names on the front doors he passed. But they were surnames, which made it even worse. De Jong, Zorgdrager, Rooseveld, Stuut, Lie. Live bodies lived here, bearing those names until they died. After that, their bodies would disintegrate, but the names that had belonged to them would continue to linger for some time in registers, surveys, and computers. And yet, somewhere in the eleven provinces, there must once upon a time have been a field in which roses had grown, and something of that once-existing field had been preserved in the white italic lettering on the door.

There was something disagreeable about these thoughts that did not fit in with the plans he had for today. Today was a happy day, he had decided, and nothing could budge him from his resolve. Besides, this first summer morning had thrown a girl into his lap who had driven the winter cold from his bones. He ought to be grateful. He decided to call her Dovey, and stepped inside a phone booth to tell Bernard that he would be a little late.

*       *

About an hour later, as he was walking across the hot, noisy Rokin on his way to Bernard's shop, he had a pleasant feeling of anticipation. Bernard Roozenboom was the last of a line of renowned art dealers and had entrenched himself in his shop like a crab, as he put it. The window, in which usually only one object was displayed, an Italian Renaissance drawing or a small painting by a not too well known master of the Dutch school, seemed to aim more at putting visitors off than at attracting them.

"Your place looks so forbidding and closed, I'm sure you have raised the culture barrier by at least a metre," Inni had said to him once.

Bernard had shrugged. "Anyone who wants to see me can find me," he had replied. "All those upstarts,
nouveau riche
builders, heart specialists, and dentists" - a tone of intense scorn set in — "buy
modern
art. In
galleries.
To buy my stuff you need intelligence, and not just ordinary intelligence but judgment as well. And this is in short supply these days. There is a lot of lazy money around, and lazy money knows nothing about anything."

Inni had never met any customers there besides foreigners and one famous art historian, but that meant nothing. In a business like Bernard's, one customer could make up for six months, and in any case Bernard was rich. To get to him you had to go through three doors. On the first one, the street door, his name was painted in gold lettering — "English lettering," said Bernard. Having ventured through this door, you were standing in a minuscule hall, unexpectedly quiet, that led to a second door. By then, the Rokin was already far away. The moment you touched the gleamingly polished knob of the second door, graceful chimes would tinkle. You then arrived in the second hall ("Isn't that what you Catholics call limbo, or would it already be purgatory?"), and usually no one appeared. Through the net curtains forming the rear of the display window, some filtered daylight fell across the Persian carpet, which muffled every footstep, and on the two, at most three, paintings on the wall, which somehow conjured up thoughts of money rather than art ("My velvet mousetrap"). After a lapse of some time, a slow shadow would stir in the glow of the lamp behind the window — a glow that at this distance reached no higher than your knees ("I live in the underworld but I am not looking for anyone"). To get there you had to descend some steps ("Three steps, just like the Gold Coach, but the House of Orange does not buy art"). The room itself was small and dark. There were two desks, one for Bernard and one for a secretary, when there was one. For the rest, the furniture consisted of a heavy armchair, a threadbare two-seater Chesterfield, and a couple of bookcases full of leather-bound reference books that Bernard did not need to consult because he knew everything already.

"Hello there," said Bernard. "I can't shake hands with you because I am being manicured. This is Mrs Theunissen. She has held sway over my nails ever since I was a baby."

"How do you do," said Inni.

The lady nodded. Under a fierce little operating lamp, Bernard's right hand lay like an anaesthetized patient in her left hand. Slowly, one by one, she filed his pink nails over a bowl of water. Until the day Inni first set eyes on Kees Verwey's portrait of Lodewijk van Deyssel, he had always thought that Bernard Roozenboom resembled le Baron de Charlus as he imagined him, although le baron would probably not have been pleased to look like what he called "an Israelite". Though what an Israelite was supposed to look like, no one could be sure of these days, ever since photographs of golden-haired female Israeli soldiers had appeared in the papers. The aristocratic cast of Bernard's nose stemmed from his own Renaissance drawings, his scant hair had that Nordic sandy colour that goes so well with tweeds, and his pale blue eyes had nothing of the glowing black cherries of the author of
A la recherche du temps perdu,
or, as Bernard preferred to say, "perda". Besides, no one except Proust and his readers had ever seen le baron, if it was possible at all to see someone made of words. However, if anyone was really training to be a cross-tempered old man, which was what Charlus and van Deyssel had been after all, each in his own way, it was Bernard. Scepticism, arrogance, aloofness, everything in his face conspired to make the biting aphorisms he employed against friend and foe all the more wounding; and this tendency of his was further strengthened by financial independence, a razor-sharp intelligence, vast erudition, and obstinate bachelorhood. His clothes, made to measure in London, concealed with some difficulty a heavy, somewhat rustic figure. His whole appearance (as he said himself) smacked defiantly of bygone times.

"Well, my friend, I suppose you've come to show me some more rubbish?" Bernard Roozenboom was the only person who refused to call him by his name, now that he was forty.
"Inni.
It makes me laugh. That isn't a name, it's a little noise. But Inigo is even more ridiculous. Some people think that if they give their child the name of a celebrity, an inherent genius will be supplied at a stroke. Inigo Wintrop, the world-famous architect. Inigo Wintrop's revolutionary designs in the Tate Gallery."

Inni put the two items he had brought on the secretary's desk.

"Let's have a look."

"When you've finished." He did not want to make himself look silly in front of the manicurist.

"I won't deny you have a fairly good nose," Bernard had once said, "but at best you're a dilettante, and frankly you are just a common pedlar."

Inni sat down on the Chesterfield and started leafing through the
Financial Times.

"Boeing has slipped, KLM has slipped, and the dollar isn't feeling too well either," said Bernard, who knew a little about Inni's financial affairs. "If you had bought that Roghman drawing from me last year, you wouldn't have to look so glum now. At least you wouldn't have lost anything then."

"I didn't know you read this," said Inni, pushing the pink paper away.

"I don't. A customer left it here."

"I suppose he came to buy an Appel."

"I am not a greengrocer," said Bernard Roozenboom. "Show Mrs Theunissen your nails, then Uncle Bernard will treat you to a nail shine."

"No thanks, I always bite them myself."

"Help yourself to the port then."

Inni felt comfortable. He liked the mahogany cupboard in which the port was kept, and he liked the crystal decanter and the seventeenth-century glass whose deep-green colour shone in the glare of Mrs Theunissen's lamp. The idea of money as such no longer interested him, now that he was getting older. Money that merely remained money, rotted away, lay stinking and mouldering somewhere. It was rejuvenated yet at the same time eaten away — growth and disease — processes unpleasantly cancelling each other out, a cancer attacking everyone who handled it to a greater or lesser degree. Here in Bernard's domain, money had been blended with a nobler element. This was not the helter-skelter of the scramblers and the grabbers but the still world of objects expressing genius and power, where money lagged a long way behind knowledge, love, collector's mania, and the concomitant sacrifices and blind irrationality. With closed eyes he could picture the room above his friend's office. There, in tall cupboards, lay the countless drawings that formed the core of Bernard's highly specialized collection. Certainly, these drawings also expressed money, but at the same time they stood for something that would endure if for whatever reason they lost their monetary value. And then there was the secret room containing Bernard's private collection, which he hardly ever showed to anyone but which, as Inni knew, although his cynical friend would never say so, embodied the meaning of his life. Sitting here, he felt the silent power of these things around him, things that in a mysterious way forged a link between him and long-vanished people and times.

When the manicurist had gone, Bernard picked up Inni's folder from the desk. In silence he peered at the first page. Inni waited.

"If you were somebody with a bit more of a clue to things, you would know what I am holding in my hand," Bernard said finally.

"It's because I am somebody with a bit of a clue that you
are
holding it in your hand."

"Well done. And yet you don't know what it is."

"At least I knew what it was not."

"What did you pay for it?"

"Too little, I think, considering the fuss you're making. What is it?"

"It isn't all that special, but it's nice."

"Nice?"

"I am crazy about Sibyls."

"Yes, that much I could see for myself, that it was a Sibyl. I
can
read, you know."

"A Catholic schoolboy knows his Latin."

"Exactly. But who is it by?"

"It's a Baldini."

"Is it." Inni had never heard of Baldini, and he wondered how terrible that was.

"Actually, we know hardly anything about Baldini," said Bernard, constructing with this "we" a worldwide congregation of scholars around himself, which naturally excluded Inni.

"Neither do we," said Inni, and waited. Now the cat and mouse game was due to begin. The nice thing about friends was that you knew them, so that they did not easily disappoint you.

"It is really a rather stiff, laboured etching," said Bernard. "Clumsy. Our friend Baldini was no great master. But he was early, that he was. Vasari mentions him. Let's say a shadow of the shadow of Botticelli."

Inni had read Vasari, on Bernard's advice, actually, but he could not remember anything about a Baldini.

"Baldini?"

"Baccio Baldini. Died before 1500. Why did you buy this?"

"I thought it was rather curious. And this
N
here, which has been crossed out so childishly — I thought that was amusing."

"Hm." In the clumsy banderole in the top right-hand corner of the etching was a legend the last word of which was
REGINA
. It had first said
RENGINA
, but the
N
had been crossed out later with the sort of cross illiterates use for their signature, earnest and conclusive.

"I see. But why curious?"

They looked at the Libyan Sibyl together. She was seated inside a wide tent of stiffly etched clothing and appeared to be reading. Behind her, her veil billowed in a gust of wind that inexplicably did not seem to disturb anything else in the picture. The upper part of her cloak was so richly decorated that her face floated white and empty above it. The eyes, which seemed to be looking through or across the book that lay open in her lap, gave her face an air of timid, dreamy absentmindedness. An absentmindedness, thought Inni, that had continued for almost five hundred years. He saw the dead pigeon before him again. A drawing of a pigeon could live on, but a pigeon could not. Such a thought signified nothing, and yet it was awesome. A big word. Enigmatic.