The Discovery of Heaven (65 page)

When he was ten, in 1978, Ms. Trip stopped Sophia on the outer bridge one afternoon.

"Has Quinten told you?"

"Told me? What do you mean?"

The previous day she had been walking in Klein Rechteren with the baroness in the rose garden. As he frequently was recently, Quinten was with Rutger. In general the baroness was not very keen on unannounced visits, but because Rutger obviously perked up when Quinten came, he was always welcome. Suddenly she heard heart-rending whines coming from the direction of the terrace. They rushed toward it and saw Rutger sitting on the ground crying, with his arms around Quinten's knees—around those of his torturer, as appeared a little later.

Quinten was busy cutting Rutger's cat's cradle into pieces—the most beautiful thing he possessed, his endless creation that he had been working on for years. His mother also regularly took the scissors to it, but of course never when he was there. They had been too flabbergasted to intervene; moreover, they had the feeling that something was happening that must not be interrupted. They were also paralyzed by the strange beauty of the scene: the wonderfully beautiful boy with that misshapen imbecile twenty years his senior at his feet, while in the vegetable garden the peacock looked at them with a fan of fifty eyes.

"Yes, calm down," said Quinten as he went on cutting the thread into yard long lengths. "Wait. We're going to make a great big curtain. You'd like to do that, wouldn't you, make a great big curtain?"

"Yes," sobbed Rutger. "Don't do that, don't cut. .."

"But if you want to make a great big curtain, you've got to do that. Then you mustn't just go on making one thread the whole time. You've got to weave. Look, like this ..."

Then he'd sat next to him on the ground, took a large needle out of his pocket, and picked up the stiff, coarse-meshed base a yard square that he had brought with him and which he had turned out to have bought with his pocket money from the fabric store in the village. While he threaded a length of yarn through it, explaining what he was doing the whole time, Rutger stopped crying and looked breathlessly, chest still heaving, at what was happening.

"Now your turn," said Quinten, giving him the needle. "And when this one is completely full, we'll buy a new cloth. And when that's full, then we'll sew it onto this one and then we'll buy another one— until," he said with a sweep of his arm, "the curtain is as big as the whole world!"

"Yes!" Rutger laughed, dribbling.

"And if you make another curtain after that, then we'll hang it on the sun and the moon!"

"Yes! Yes!" Rutger bent over to him and gave him a kiss on his cheek. No one had ever had the idea that it was possible to intervene in Rutger's senseless activity, let alone that anyone would have had the courage to carry it through.

"How did you get that brainwave?" Max asked him that evening in awe. "How did you dare?"

"Well, I just did . . ." said Quinten.

Max looked at Sophia and said: "That boy has an absolutist streak in his character."

The nurturing architectural dream that had appeared after his visit to his mother turned out to recur every few months. But it never ended in a nightmare, although the fortified door with the padlock on it at "the center of the world" must still be there. Whenever he had wandered around the limitless construction, through the labyrinth of rooms, past the decorated interior facades, along the galleries, he lay still for a moment after waking up, cracking the top joints of his thumbs as he did every morning, and tried to retain the memory—but always the images took their leave after a few minutes, like in the movies when the end of the film became invisible if the lights went on too soon. He gradually began to wonder where that building was. It must actually be somewhere, because each time he saw it clearly. But since he never met anyone there, he was certainly the only person who knew of its existence—and that meant a lot, because it was secret and he mustn't speak to anyone about it: of course not to Max, but not to Granny either; not even to his father, the few times that he saw him. For that matter how could it simply be somewhere in the world when the whole world was not built up? Perhaps it was in another world. He had also given it a name: the Citadel.

Sometimes he did not think of the Citadel for weeks. If it presented itself again, he sometimes went to Mr. Themaat's to see if there were illustrations of anything like it in his thick books. The professor had retired and now lived permanently at Groot Rechteren, so his library had expanded still further. Quinten was always welcome. Occasionally it happened that Mr. Themaat was in his rocking chair without a book on his lap. His face suddenly changed unrecognizably, as if it had been turned to stone, and that stone looked at him with two eyes expressing such total despair that he went away at once. It was as though Mr. Themaat in that state no longer even knew who he was. For a few days he did not dare visit him; but when he came back there was suddenly no trace of the stone.

"What are you looking for, for goodness' sake, QuQu?"

"Just looking."

"I don't believe a word of it. You're not just looking at pictures."

Quinten looked at him. He must not betray the secret, of course, because then the dream might not come back. He asked: "What is
the
building, Mr. Themaat?"

Themaat gave a deep sigh. "If only my students had ever asked me such a good question. What is
the
building?" he repeated, folding his hands behind his head, leaning back in his rocking chair and looking at the stucco of the ceiling. "What is
the
building . . ." While he was still thinking, his wife came in. He said, "QuQu has just asked me the question."

"And what is that?"

"What is
the
building?"

"Maybe this castle," said Elsbeth.

"Yes," said Themaat, laughing at Quinten. "Women usually look less far afield, and perhaps they're right. Wait a moment. Perhaps I know," he said.
"The
building of course doesn't exist, but I think the Pantheon comes a good second."

A little later they sat next to each other on the ground looking at photos and architectural drawings of the Pantheon in Rome: the only Roman temple—devoted to "all gods"—that had been completely preserved. Quinten had seen at once that it was not like the Citadel at all. It was not a maze, but precisely very simple and clear, with a portico like a Greek temple facade at the front, as Mr. Themaat called it, with pillars and two superimposed triangular pediments; behind them, a heavy round structure that from inside consisted of a single huge, empty, windowless rotunda, with a large round hole in the middle of the cupola, through which the light entered—a little like the fontanel in a baby's skull.

On a cross-section drawing Mr. Themaat demonstrated with a compass that if you continued the line of the cupola downward, you produced a pure sphere resting on the ground. According to him, you could see the temple as a depiction of the world.

That meant, Quinten reflected,
this
world—and that was obviously not what he was dreaming about. But nevertheless it was connected with the Citadel, perhaps through the opposition of the decorated front and the closed back. In any case it fascinated him—also the carved letters on the architrave, which announced through a number of abbreviations, that
AGRIPPA
was the architect. The emperor Hadrian had magnanimously had this inscribed after it had been completely rebuilt, Themaat told him—and at the mention of the name Hadrian he suddenly stopped and looked at Quinten—the deep blue of his eyes between the dark eyelashes, the lank black hair around his moon-pale skin.

Themaat made a gesture in his direction and said to Elsbeth: "Antinous."

She smiled, glanced at him, and nodded.

Quinten didn't understand what was meant, but he didn't care.

One day, when he started talking about those letters to Mr. Spier, in fact just for something to say, Spier immediately became enthusiastic:

"That's the Quadrata, QuQu, the most beautiful capital there has ever been! How did you find out about that?" Then he told him that it was also called "lapidary" from the Latin
lapis,
meaning "stone." "That letter forms the perfect balance between body and soul."

"How is that possible? A letter isn't a human being, is it?"

"Of course it is!"

"Well how can letters have a soul?"

"They speak to you, don't they?"

"That's true." Quinten nodded earnestly.

"Like everyone, a letter has a soul and a body. Its soul is what it says and its body is what it's made of: ink, or stone."

Quinten thought of his mother. Was she just a couple of ink spots, then? Or a stone with no letters on it?

"A letter doesn't have to be made of anything," he said.

"Oh no? I sometimes dream of pure letters, floating through the air, but that's impossible, just like a soul without a body."

"And what about those letters in the Pantheon? They're not made of stone, precisely not stone. The stone has been carved away: I've seen Theo Kern doing that sometimes. They're made of nothing. So you sometimes do have a body without a soul in it, don't you?"

He was now in the sixth grade, and according to the teacher he should gradually start spending more time on his homework. His marks were not bad, but not good either; what naturally interested him, he mastered immediately, even if it was difficult; all the rest, even when it was actually easy, required lots of effort. But instead of learning his geography, or doing arithmetic, he preferred to find his way toward the Citadel with Mr. Themaat.

Sometimes the professor showed him examples of modern architecture from the first half of the twentieth century, by Frank Lloyd Wright or Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe, of which he was quite fond himself. Sometimes Quinten thought it was nice, but that was all; because the cool objectivity of those matchboxes in no way reminded him of the Citadel, he lost interest.

Classical buildings came closest, centrally the Roman Pantheon, which, with its circular, windowless central section, added something somber and threatening to the pure light of the Greek temples. The Athenian Parthenon, which Mr. Themaat showed him, might be perfect, even as a ruin, but to his taste it was too rarefied and transparent. According to Themaat, the Romans had in fact never invented anything themselves from an artistic point of view; they had taken that sense of circularity and somberness from Etruscan tombs,
tumuli,
as could still be seen in Rome in the mausoleum of Augustus, or the tomb of Hadrian, the Castel Sant'Angelo. He should go and see all those things one day, later.

Under the direction of Themaat, who once talked of him to Max as "my best student," Quinten had soon found his way to the Italian Renaissance. There he was most fascinated by the churches of Palladio, who again showed that combination of brilliant classical facades and introverted brick walls. Themaat praised him for his good, albeit not very progressive, taste but that compliment was lost on him; none of it had anything to do with taste.

In the baroque, he had a vague feeling of recognition in the exuberant ornamentation, and neoclassical buildings from the nineteenth century fascinated him because they reminded him of those of Palladio in the sixteenth century. In any case they were all exteriors: magnificent exteriors, but he was precisely not interested in exteriors, only interiors.

Running the risk that he was revealing something of his secret, he decided one afternoon to ask a crucial question:

"Is there a building that has an interior but no exterior?"

Themaat stared at him for a couple of seconds before he was able to answer. "What made you think of something like that?"

"I just thought of it."

"Of course that's impossible, just like a building with an exterior but no interior."

"That's perfectly possible."

"How?"

"If it's not hollow inside, but of solid stone. Like a sculpture."

"There's something in that," said Themaat with a laugh. "And perhaps an interior without an exterior is possible too."

While he looked in his bookcase, he said that he himself had been brought up with the idea that the Renaissance was old-fashioned, and to tell the truth he still thought so; but when he heard Quinten so preoccupied with it, he had the feeling that there was something like a "re-Renaissance" coming. Then he showed him photographs of Palladio's Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, his architectural swan song.

From the outside it was an ugly brick box, but inside it showed indescribable magnificence. The back and the side walls were made of inlaid marble facades, exuberantly decorated with Corinthian columns, statues in luxurious window frames, with triangular and segment-shaped pediments; there were other sculptures—on pedestals, ornaments, scrolls, reliefs, inscriptions, behind the sloping benches of the semicircular room more pillars and sculptures—all made of wood and plaster, but you had to know that. That was also an exterior without an interior, said Themaat, because it was a piece of decor, and at the same time it was an interior without an exterior. Quinten understood that, but it was only partially a depiction of the Citadel.

"For that matter, do you remember that book by Bibiena that you used to like looking at so much?"

No, Quinten had forgotten, but when he saw it again a vague memory awakened in him. Themaat explained to him that those decor drawings showed the inside of buildings that had no outside. Obviously pleased with his explanation, the professor looked at the perspective drawings a little longer. Then he suddenly said: "Wait! Perhaps I have something even nicer for you."

From the case where everything was in perfect alphabetical order, he looked a little farther on from Palladio, Pantheon, and Parthenon—a large book of reproductions of Piranesi's
Carceri.

When he opened it, it gave Quinten a jolt. Almost! It was almost there, his dream!—the same rooms continuing endlessly in all directions, full of staircases, bridges, arches, galleries; the deep shadows without sources of light; everything filled with the same still air. But in these etched prison visions it seemed chilly and dank, while in the Citadel it was warm and sweet. Except for him, the Citadel was empty, but here there were figures to be seen everywhere; the pillars and the massive, decorated facade were also missing. Only in combination with the decors of Palladio and Bibiena would it have really resembled the scenario of his dream.