The Water Statues, page 2
He recognized it, he had given that Buddha to X even before he’d gone to live in the basements. Some faces, in a crowd of child flaneurs, can be unsettling, and they remain suspended there a long time. Then little by little they fade, as though erased by a limp flannel hand. X had been an athlete and an eccentric before putting on weight. He’d grown fat around the age of fifteen, but they’d been done with one another just in time.
He walked on, saw more decorated rooms, people sitting reading the newspaper; the windows of houses proved to him how very quiet the lives of others could be, how pleasant it is to be in an armchair and to hear the patter of rain on glass panes. He was once again persuaded that his life was passing, had passed, and this made him rejoice while admiring the efforts of his fellow creatures, of the Dutch population with their firmness regarding the radiant pinnacles of domestic comfort — such home-sweet-home settings made his heart sink, so much happiness he was happier living without.
Behind another window he saw a woman dressed in black, a widow perhaps, he thought, with a yellowing streak in her hair and cheeks reddened by the heat of a lit fireplace. Her hair hung straight down her mournful back; her hips widened then withdrew into the shoes. A chubby cat dozed, and the embers seemed weary of burning. Maybe the husband and the servant had left, for a better life, and the woman had stopped fighting with the tailor over her last dress. And last things had come up again for the man strolling in the rain: he imagined the woman’s husband, a placid gentleman who in the face of chaos shrugs and trustingly goes on playing with the little fireplace spade at the hearth. Though yearning for peace and quiet, he was tempted to ring the bell, he wouldn’t have minded sitting next to that lady. But he walked on. The light in the windows was being switched off.
The people were sleeping; the headboards were lasting out the night. Beeklam watched carefully to see if some unholy light might anywhere reveal the face of an acquaintance. They all seemed asleep. A fan-shaped beard emerged from behind a door and disappeared into the night. But Beeklam distributed greetings, kissing the tips of his fingers, as he waited for a signal from handkerchiefs, rags, patches, curtains, anything that might inflate in the wind, in the thrill of spring, and express an aerial jubilation, at least. Where was the spirit of the world hiding its stock of dreamers that night?
It was still raining and his shoes waded through puddles. He stopped in front of a manhole. Beeklam thought of ladybugs, crickets, and jets of water as rivals. He thought of the ending of one book: “Water is a burnt body,” and he whispered the line to himself. Someone spoke to him then:
“I read that, too, somewhere, sir. It is always a good thing when along with one’s profession — I am a traveling salesman — one has a passion for something one is well acquainted with, such as the sentence you quoted: it gives a sense of the world’s luxury. And that two vagabonds appear to leave a library and find one another, that’s a luxury, too — their backs turned to each other, at this hour of the night, in that lull before each new oscillation of the pendulum. And yes, dear sir, one can consider this hour, on the whole, to be malignant. An unknown character in antiquity, the traveling salesman: he sees nothing in depth, neither the clients nor the places; he has a good memory for names, and as for things, he appreciates their surface. That’s me, sir. It is a luxury, I was saying before I went astray, this nocturnal meeting of ours, that the two of us, without knowing one another, were joined — what a dreadful verb — in our thinking, since, the fatal force of an encounter can manifest itself after all even in hatred.”
* * *
BEEKLAM: Then he turned his very tranquil gaze in my direction. And I left.
BEEKLAM: As far as I can remember, Reginald was a tall man, thin and bald, his once rosy complexion had become white as driven snow. Even at the time, I had taken note of his appearance, and I do not intend to make him out to be more handsome than he was. But I had a feeling I’d never see him again.
BEEKLAM: Late again, my father used to say, didn’t you hear the gong?
I was in the garden, I’d answer.
REGINALD (taking a seat at the table): Last spring the asparagus was truly excellent — you are too keen on horticulture, last spring the vegetable garden was more lush, you’ve abused it.
* * *
The shadow of a long index finger, thin as the sound of a music box, appeared on the wall.
* * *
BEEKLAM: Yes, Daddy, I may have exaggerated.
REGINALD: Doesn’t your head spin when you descend into the vegetable garden?
BEEKLAM: Yes, I am conflicted, when I bend down toward the earth, I feel my fingers burning.
* * *
With bleak gravity I contemplate my fingers, curled and folded on the table.
REGINALD: If you are finished we can get up now.
BEEKLAM: Certainly. I’ve had nothing to eat, it’s healthier not to eat.
* * *
I was shrinking from my bones, and to keep fasters company, Lampe would go by, perfectly erect, his elbows close to his torso. With fierce willpower he sat at the table, as though to prove that the dinner was meant for him alone and that he’d as soon share it with anyone as he would his dreams.
BEEKLAM: Sometimes, in the evening, we’d sit quietly by the fireplace to think, looking at the embers. “It’s damp,” my father would say at last, and bidding me good night hurried away. We talked a great deal in those years, but I am certain that Reginald’s heart never responded with sincere or spontaneous ardor to the words that gushed from his son’s youthful throat. I had in me a mental stampede of conversations with different people — construction workers, priests, maids, and many others, I was careful to polish my words and breathe life into them, and more often than not the words were beyond the range of my father’s precise arguments. Yet father and son kept each other company well; they seldom spoke of what was between them, so distant and fragrant, of the wife and mother, who had “simply passed before us through the door that leads into that world of light where all is radiant, and where one day we’ll be reunited in a bond of ineffable beatitude still beyond our grasp.” My father Reginald enjoyed speaking like this.
He didn’t mind the wait but spared himself, nurturing his health with the little ancillary graces of a jailer, and, when he gently led me by the hand for long salutary walks, it seemed to me that his constant labor on earthly ministrations was nothing but a devout homage to life. He was solicitous of it, and, if a lazy tear nestled in the corner of an eye, he did not brush it away but remained so, his eye glistening, ardent, in a darkened room, until a pale light lit his face, so frequently radiant.
For hundreds of evenings the lamp lit those two up as they sat at the same table; Reginald frowning and absentminded, his face bright; Beeklam with a latent light within him, which in that company was always obscured and veiled. There might not have been two men more radically alien to one another. The father, with great composure, either spoke of what interested him, or simply kept quiet. The son racked his brains to find a subject that wouldn’t be dangerous, that would spare Reginald fresh proof of his innate cruelty and of his innocent, clueless inhumanity; and Beeklam gingerly traveled the paths of conversation, like a lady who walks along a muddy path holding up her skirts. “Pity the man who does not know mirth,” Reginald would say at the end of one of those evenings. “But now,” Beeklam would reply, “I must go back to my shovel.” And he would go back to the garden. On a bench a toad kept him company: “A slaughterhouse aesthetic must exist.”
Lampe descended from an ancient family of the Bernese Oberland. On his little finger he wore a gold ring engraved with a hatchet and a pitchfork. He bore no trace of his warring Protestant ancestors, and from a great aunt he’d inherited the somewhat feminine appearance of his neck and hands. Beneath white skin, blue veins surfaced like rivulets reminiscent of the quiet delicate work of fishermen when they reanimate worms with a bit of water and finally place them in soft sand, in pretty boxes, like little beds or tin coffins, deployed one next to the other, where they might die in peace without relinquishing their freshness right away. They certainly weren’t the hands of a laborer. His ancestors had been laborers. When Lampe knocked on Reginald’s door, looking for work, he looked like a gentleman offering his services in exchange for loyalty, he offered himself up in a detached way, almost as though in return for a marriage. And like a warrior he had scoured other households, inspecting their owners and the furnishings, he had examined them, and had gone on his way, detached as ever, and more and more wistful. He was not looking for a female employer but for single men, or widowers, and not young. He was looking for a solitude not too unlike his own. There are tasks in domesticity that appear to belong to the world of dreams rather than the crass reality of domestic labor. He was not like his ancestors who descended from the Alps in a fury, raring for action.
On his face had been spread as though with a spatula, an expression of peace, a sermon painted over a pale complexion. Though thin, in the fortress of his bones there was steel.
* * *
Those nimble bones were held up by the certainty that one can float very well without hope; he was indulgent and benevolent to others, and fixed them with a cheerful grim smile. He pecked at adversities here and there as though in life there were but two possible inclinations: toward desire or toward magic, and moreover, as if one were a whitewash for the other.
* * *
Lampe felt at ease, as soon as he crossed the threshold and shook Reginald’s hand. Swift, spare, absentminded, the two men had hardly met but were in perfect agreement, two finicky little plants, intimately delighted to have survived a pruning.
LAMPE: Who was the widower? Someone long-limbed. Reginald gave the impression that by his calm devoid of sweetness he had bypassed every disorder. His eyes, he told me, had long looked at the things of this world as though they beheld the Law, to which he felt bound as by a team spirit. And those eyes had also rested on childhood friends with brotherly feelings — Rosalind, Magdalena, and Thelma. Tall, mild, stern in their ways, placid, they offered some of the greatest advantages in life to a man who did not hold much store by the insolent demands of passions. “I am sure you know,” he’d say, “the wild sadness that comes when one recalls a happy time.” “It is sad to say, dear Reginald,” I’d reply, “but I cannot recall a single sentence or gesture of that time, though I can perfectly recall the appearance of some passerby I never met.” He thought that was quite enough. Answering him was already an atonement. An atonement could not disturb him. He had known Magdalena, Rosalind, and Thelma forever, they had grown up beside him, they had been loyal as children and remained so. In their brave bonnets they kept all the qualities that come down in a plumb line from a single source: sincerity. Growing up with them, that trait exalted them and brought them to unreasonable solitude. How could such an inner heritage go unnoticed, and why did such rectitude make for a void around them? Only one little boy looked at them, a boy with a sense of justice as finely weighted as a goldsmith’s scale. He resigned himself to their company, which made up for his mortification, and he started being a person who was complacent toward anything that might drive him far from life.
REGINALD: I was at ease around Thelma, everything was so sparing, natural, and choleric. Even simplicity seemed painted through the rooms, and, searching for comfort and company, I found something altogether fatal there: the walls paneled in limpid obsequious wood gave off in the fire’s warmth a fragrance reminiscent of hot summer hours in swamps. It was as though everything in the rooms and in the house had been mowed; a whiff of puritanical fury had settled on all inanimate things. And so I lifted the wings of my frock coat at the faint, nearly imperceptible shifts in the wood’s grain revealing disconsolate elegances — heads, triangular hoods, a delicate skull — as Thelma suggested, “Those are the thoughts of the woodcutter.”
* * *
In that temporary calm, Reginald got up in a certain contemplative stupor — and, like a couple of woodcutters, they shook hands. A while later, a brief ceremony joined their two existences. As though they might see better things over there, Thelma’s eyes stared into the far distance, cold and calm.
BEEKLAM: Sometimes I wanted to speak to Lampe. I would ask him for news of Reginald, of the house I had lived in, which seemed now to belong only to him, Lampe. As with certain spirits that one doesn’t fail to listen to, I could hear his words though he hardly had any voice left — the raucous notes of a crow. But he had much strength. He had walled up the windows.
“Woe to him who has no home,” and as he said so, he was absorbed in counting the windows of the house opposite him.
One window had broken panes, held in place by caulking, which drew two profiles of women: the noses touched, the mouths, as though arrested in an exclamation, were almost open. “But there is some pink around the palate,” Beeklam said, “and those talking shards invite me to enter; so, after crossing the courtyard, I go up the stairs, the eloquent and austere architecture watching me. A place for tutors, I told myself, and was nearly frightened. I entered into a kind of parlor where I was expected. I was not wrong, the glass faces began to speak: ‘It is with great pleasure,’ Magdalena said, ‘that I shake Lampe’s hand, a bony hand issuing from a starched cuff. He walks slowly, as though he has lead in his shoes.’ With sensitive fingers she counted the flowers I’d brought. Rosalind was embroidering. Her smooth convex forehead lifted. We agreed that it was a lovely day. They asked me if I’d ever read Anna Katharina Emmerich. No, never, I replied. I stayed a while longer with them, I don’t know how long.”
Beeklam found himself once again out in the street. The city seemed to him vague and distant, there was a smell of damp flowers; two little girls were fighting, one using her fists, the other a small red umbrella. He admired the elegant confidence of brutality; the feral turn of horror. He continued to watch them like a beggar, and with all his civility. Then he went back to his basements. The statues fainted in the folds of darkness, emitting a brief hum. A wave came between Beeklam and the night. A few millponds remained in cracks in the walls. He found himself listening to the wind as it blew around the building he was about to leave and with his eyes bid farewell to all things.
A thin old woman appeared in the basements, looking around, and smiling over nothing. Perhaps she hoped to find something she might steal. But she only met the gaze of Beeklam, in a dark suit with white stripes, at the far end of an immense room.
* * *
BEEKLAM: A little boy used to live here, he said he wanted to live as someone who’d drowned, and he started collecting statues. The children — you, madam, must be acquainted with some — often say that they want to go back to another world, one they’ve known, full of incredible paradigms of perfection. The boy remembered well the beauty he hadn’t been able to hold on to, more than once he’d said that he wanted to go back there. He had a horror of anything hereditary, because whatever comes to us by natural inheritance belongs to the dead. I am an old gentleman. I listen to children. I have packed up the statues, I was paid well, and now regret not being able to spend that money. I’ve become rich. I sold three of them on the sly, the best ones: they were called Magdalena, Rosalind, and Thelma. I can’t resist betraying anyone giving me orders — or betraying, simply. That child, who was my master, said to me: “Drown them, throw them all in the water, or you’ll be cursed. The Flying Dutchman will wring your neck.” I don’t believe in anything, I believe only that it’s a good thing to betray, I believe that it’s a good thing to transgress some part of orders, not necessarily anything that might bring one well-being, something on the contrary that might bring unhappiness, despair to others. I have not kept my word, and what is my word, I have no word, even though I chatter like a phantom. Now she stares at me without saying a word. Or is about to announce my death — there must be something calling itself destiny. We should get along, ma belle. I betray, and she takes.
BEEKLAM: Today I went back to the basements, one last time; permit me one more story, the rest is gone: I mean, my statues. Victor sat by the fire. Even a tiger would have rubbed itself against the crinoline of those flames, attracted by the breeze playing through the embers. Winter was about to end and the flames had sunk almost to the ground; ashes fluttered in the darkness. One last flame fell and a whiff of frosty air pushed the door open slowly, as though with one hand, disclosing a detestable crystal-clear dawn.
II
Toward the end of the eighteenth century a phlegmatic giant, with hands that were too small, built a pavilion in a bamboo grove, a hardheaded and ingenious mixture of Eastern and Alpine Swiss ideas, inspired by an obsessive pastoral poise. He was surrounded by a veranda on which the placid talons of leaves spread shade, depth, and disorder. You couldn’t see the sea from up there, one only heard the sound of water when it foamed and raged. So, too, leaves ruffled by storms bend as though they were ears. In the fall they would creak and snap. The breeze played with the dust.
In the summer, the landscape was bright, even cheerful; but from September to March, at sunset, with strong winds and gurgling waves washing along the mossy floor, the place conjured only dead sailors and shipwrecks. In the remaining three months, pale ruins of greenery, clay, and frayed flowers live out a life of strife, after shouted invocations to spring. To shout is perhaps excessive, though there was no way to be reborn other than by swearing. “I want you to take this place elsewhere,” Katrin said.
When Katrin entered the pavilion for the first time, dust and insects had elegantly coated all the rooms, a rocking chair upholstered in mold and brocade still swayed. The ants, eunuchs of order, proceeded along their teeming avenues on the floor, and a large fly droned loudly on rotten wooden planks.
