My devotion, p.4
My Devotion, page 4
At university, not long after we arrived, I met someone. Erik was studying economics and he worked a few hours a week at the front desk of the university library. He had, as I would later realize, erroneously interpreted my enthusiasm for the place as being directed at him personally—he was convinced I was making a pass at him, while I was smiling giddily just to be holding my library card in my hand. He invited me to go out with him. Then, more from a lack of any real excuse not to be with him than because I really wanted it to, our romance began. With hindsight, I can see the part he played in my break-up with you—not really so much a break-up as the end of our physical relations. In Rome, we had been so isolated that the fact of being together had never really been questioned. But before long my relationship with Erik created barriers, as necessary as they were unexpected, within the life you and I shared, the life we’d always shared. I don’t think I even tried to explain to him what I’d been through before—I probably just told him that I was the daughter of the British ambassador to Rome, and let him draw his own conclusions. Instead of telling him the truth about you and me—did I really even know it then, do I know it now?—I put the past behind me. But when he spent the night at the house I could hardly sleep, because of his nocturnal fidgeting, and because he snored. We were not close—after a year together we still did not know each other, never understood each other, had not changed a jot, had not taken a single step towards each other, we were still the girl who smiles in the stacks of the huge library and the boy who thinks the smile is for him. In the end, once I managed to extricate myself from my own lie, I returned with relief to the only life I really loved, the life I shared with you. I remember it well: on my way home, after I had just broken up with Erik in a coffee shop on the Negen Straatjes, walking in the drizzle and holding the little cardboard box that contained belongings of mine he had given back to me, and feeling so good in that moment as I closed the door behind me. I leaned for a moment against the wood to catch my breath, and without warning you appeared, a glass in your hand. For the entire duration of my affair you had said nothing, merely greeting Erik when you ran into him and nodding your head when I reminded you of his existence—but when you saw me that day and I told you it was all over, this time, you gave an almost imperceptible smile and said, laconically:
“Of course. Because that’s not what love is about, Helen.”
By the winter of 1959 we’d been living together for three years, and we would spend sixteen more years in the apartment in Amsterdam. Sometimes at night I heard noises coming from your room, and I could not work out whether you were weeping or making love. You were young, and enthusiastic, and desperately trying to find your way. It was during this period that you decided to take your ancient typewriter from the cupboard where you had stored it on arriving. You put it on the desk in your room, then you told me that from then on you were going to write novels. You locked yourself in, and when I would knock on the wooden door and tell you it was time to go shopping or to hang out the laundry, you would shout from within:
“I can’t help you, sorry, I can’t, Helen, I’m writing a book!”
It was a nightmare. At the time, I was trying to write a book which sought to record the turbulent emotions I felt when reading Thomas Hardy, and I wasn’t having any luck, and you knew this very well, so your utter self-absorption in the middle of all this came across as pure provocation and was hurtful to me: it left me speechless. For weeks, I nevertheless put up with the humiliation you imposed on me; I took care of the house without you, walked alone through the snowy streets dragging our bags of shopping—you hadn’t lost your appetite—scrubbed the bath, swept the stairs, washed the sheets and the dishes, remembered to buy tea, and cooked dinners for our friends. I was full of empathy towards Mrs. Tolstoy and Mrs. Freud and Mrs. Marx and all the others. And I was going mad. I couldn’t write anymore. I did not have a second to myself, and I could no longer make any noise in my own house. You had locked yourself in your room like some ferocious bear I lived in dread of rousing from his long hibernation. You explained that you had decided to write every day from nine in the morning until eight o’clock at night, you had worked out the average number of words in a masterpiece, then the average number of words you could type per minute, and then you’d calculated the time it would take for you to write your book if you maintained this pace. I hated your idea, I hated your book, and I was so angry with you for making me hate a book. My anger made me cruel, and when you took a break to come and join me for lunch, I would ask you, casual as can be, how you were getting on—weren’t you a bit frightened of rushing into such a project, did you suffer from writer’s block at all, what exactly did you think about in the morning when you sat down to work, what were you hoping to gain from the entire project, anyway, you weren’t expecting to become a writer—or were you? Hadn’t you bitten off more than you could chew?
You didn’t say anything. You occasionally shivered slightly, but it was December, after all, and you didn’t say anything. You had never been so withholding with me before. You literally slipped through my fingers. When I asked you in a detached tone of voice whether I could read what you had written, you said no.
“Of course,” I said, “I can wait until you’ve finished.”
“No,” you said softly, not looking at me. “Never, Helen. You are never going to read my book. You would be far too critical, and I don’t want your opinion.”
I made fun of you. I told you that the first thing everyone must learn when writing was to accept criticism, to learn to take it, even to anticipate it, and it was ridiculous to sit off in one’s corner writing any old rubbish and then caress it like a masterpiece without ever sharing it with others or giving anyone the chance to form an opinion.
“It’s not ridiculous at all,” you replied. “You have your vision of literature, I have mine, and that’s it. You don’t have a monopoly on writing, because no such thing exists. You’re jealous because I’m writing a book. If that’s really your thing, why aren’t you writing your own book?”
I became obsessed with the idea of reading the book you claimed to be writing under my nose. I spied on your comings and goings to the bathroom, hoping to slip into your room while you were in the shower, but you had locked the door. For a full month, you didn’t leave the apartment. Every day, all day long, you stayed locked in your room. Your lunch break was carefully timed. At last one afternoon, you went out at three o’clock, not saying where you were going. The moment I saw through the window that you had turned the street corner, I went to try your door. To my astonishment it wasn’t locked. I went in. I saw the neatly made bed, with your patterned duvet, the posters on the wall, the little shelf of books, and on the desk, the typewriter, gleaming, threatening, the focus of my sleepless nights. I went closer. There was a page on the platen. I leaned closer to read what was there, and the last word typed at the bottom of the page was my first name. Frank, do you remember what you wrote?
When I met you
I had never
Loved anyone yet.
Nor had you.
And you still haven’t.
All your love
Has melted like snow in sunlight
Into your work
So I try to work
And to understand you, Helen.
That, to my knowledge, is the only poem you ever wrote. I tore the sheet from the typewriter that day, because it was clearly meant for me, so obviously a message addressed to me, a delivery staged like some lesson to teach me who I was. We never spoke about it. I took the poem and went out before you came back, and the following day you stopped locking yourself in your room, stopped talking about writing a book. I never found out what you had done, exactly, during those four weeks alone in your room for which I made you pay so dearly. That poem is your only poem, and now that I think of it, standing here across from you in London, because a spot of ink on the nail of your middle finger suddenly reminded me of your erstwhile writerly ambitions, it gives me shivers to think that that folded sheet of paper is only a few streets away, hidden at the back of my wardrobe in the Hartmann Tresore safe, a safe which contains nothing else.
PAINTING
Charlie, one of my former classmates, had stopped coming to class a few months earlier, but we still saw him now and then, because he lived in our neighborhood and was trying to seduce me. One day he invited us for a drink in the late afternoon, and there were huge sheets of newspaper spread all over the floor, because Charlie was standing on a ladder repainting a wall, with one brush in his hand and another between his teeth. As soon as we arrived he came down off his ladder to prepare us a hot drink, and we chatted for a long time, standing in his kitchen—a real shambles—holding our cups of tea.
“Charlie, what’s that smell?” you asked him after a while.
“It’s the paint,” replied Charlie with a shrug.
“The paint,” you echoed.
Have I attached too much importance to that moment? I don’t know. But ever since, I’ve firmly believed that it was, in part, from that moment on that everything fell into place for you. I’ve never forgotten how your face suddenly lit up, interested, relaxed. I remember how surprised Charlie was that you hadn’t immediately recognized the characteristic smell of fresh paint, but in a way, he was mistaken: you may have been incapable of guessing the nature of what you were smelling, but you had indisputably recognized the paint as something that was mysteriously meant for you, and had reacted to it at once. You didn’t say anything to me, not a word, as we walked home along the canals, but the subject certainly had not left you, the thought had made its way into your mind like the scent wafting into your nostrils. In the weeks and months that followed, a new kind of smile came to bloom on your face, a half smile, both fierce and very calm, and I often wanted to ask you about it, but something held me back, as if there were something so private about it that even I did not dare bring it up. I would think about it at night as I drifted off, astonished that I had let yet another day go by without mentioning it to you, but I could not find the words, I did not know how to frame my question—what is this new smile all about?—and by morning I had forgotten about it. The days went by. To be honest, I was very busy myself at the time: in addition to the various translations I was working on, I was writing a piece for an academic volume I’d collaborated on, about the first use of copyright. Time was rushing by, and I must have been sincerely relieved to sense that you were busy and content, after all these years of torment. You no longer stayed at home pacing back and forth like some caged beast; you went out, you would leave the house before I was even awake, and you came back only late at night, eyes shining, while you went on smiling, inexplicably.
What you were doing all that time was something I could only guess at or work out much later: I believe you had set off on a quest to learn about painting, not exactly sure what you were looking for, but buoyed by the certainty that you would find it wherever painting was also to be found. And Amsterdam, in the 1960s, was a good place for that. I imagine you must have gone to the Rijksmuseum, to the Stedelijk, to the Rembrandt House, and you must have talked about painting with people around you, probably with Charlie at first, and I imagine Charlie failed to see what you were after, so you went elsewhere for the answers to your tireless questions—antique shops, art-supply shops, the street, cafés, you must have talked to everyone you met and let yourself bounce off their ideas, followed the thread all the way to the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, the State Academy of Fine Arts, and from there, step by step, to the Kunstnijverheidsonderwijs, the Institute of Applied Art, where you met Theo Soto-Salinas and Ossip Gang, who were both students there in 1966. You never studied at either of those institutions, despite claims to the contrary, but you hung out in the neighborhood bars and at the little exhibition galleries, and that was how you got to know Soto and Gang, and many others whose names have not found their place in the great history of art. It was thanks to them that you were able to study after all, in absentia, so to speak, or contumaciously, rather, since the word contumacy comes from the Latin word for spirit of independence, obstinacy, stubbornness, but also pride—and years later, when the time for glory had arrived, your arrogance would remain intact when you asserted that, of the three of you, only you had never belonged to any school. Perhaps it is my own temperate nature that has inspired this opinion, but personally I never believed that either Gang or Soto belonged to any school at all—they had simply studied somewhere, and besides, they were younger than we were, and better at everything than you were when you met them. Unwittingly, they gave you an education, by repeating over a pint of beer in the evening what they’d learned in class during the day, and by showing you their tools, introducing you to their friends, and by opening the doors to their world for you, they trained you. Later, your ingratitude towards them always seemed misguided to me, a lack of manners, but you would probably counter, even today, that a lack of manners is meaningless, in comparison to creative genius.
Yet you do owe them a great deal. I remember the first evening you brought them home, those two lively, intelligent young men, with their hands callused from the strain of working with chisel and sandpaper, and they were famished—something you never mentioned later, along with everything else, when you compared yourself to them; you never mentioned how poor they’d been, how their parents had paid for their admission fees and for lodgings that were just barely decent, but gave them only a few guilders a month for their room and board, but I remember those starving young men with their emaciated cheeks. I remember, Frank. I haven’t forgotten a thing. Even if you were gifted, as time has amply proven, your expertise at painting was not heaven-sent. You worked hard—simply, you worked in the shadows, and I suspect you destroyed all your first sketches as if to erase the history of your failed attempts, to give the impression that you were already incredibly skilled from the very start. I often thought that in the beginning you suffered from some sort of complex with regard to Ossip and Soto, who had learned to paint much earlier, and that this was why you covered your tracks so carefully, in order to come out on top by asserting that this was not your vocation but an inherent gift, rather, discovered late in the day; that was the only argument still available to you. There might be a certain charm to producing awkward but already striking drawings from childhood, but to offer similar preliminary sketches to the eyes of the world at the age of twenty-eight shows an indisputable lack not only of panache but above all of lucidity. You were not always brilliantly perceptive, but it must be said that once you got started in your career as an artist—your first and only career—you did things stylishly, like any good son of a diplomat. You toiled in utter secrecy, sneaking your art supplies into the house without me even knowing; you spied on your best friends, never letting any of your intentions show—I am convinced that in the beginning, for months, even, Soto and Ossip and all the others they introduced you to did not have the slightest idea of what you were planning, and no doubt they saw you as just some young man, a bit older than they were, who was at sufficiently loose ends to tag along to private viewings and give them a hand with odd jobs. But all that time, you were learning: the jargon, the materials, the ceramics, the mixtures, the history, the mythology of art; you bought them drinks with your father’s money, but you were the one who was drinking in their teachings, you were the one who desired, in the whole business. They didn’t see you coming. Nor did I.
I must admit I don’t know anything about your actual apprenticeship. I was never given the slightest report on your first sketches or botched attempts. As I said, I was busy with my books, and you must have found the perfect time slots to work well away from my gaze, because for months I did not suspect a thing. I thought you went out, and came home late, that you had made new acquaintances and were sharing things with them—we had been living together for ten years by then, and I didn’t shadow you—you had your life, and I had mine. I’d played big sister to you for long enough, and I was tired of it, I had other priorities. Seven years earlier, when you had wanted to shut yourself out of sight to write your novel, it had seemed unbearable to me, but I thought the poem that had emerged from that time had cured me, to a degree, of my worse inclinations and helped me grow up. I was leading a rich and fascinating life by then, a life I had built and which I was proud of, and I knew how to be happy for others. To be sure, to see you captivated by something relieved me of the guilt I sometimes felt at the thought I was leaving you by the wayside. I think my contentment at putting in good work made me more generous. From time to time I met Ossip and Soto and all the others in our living room, and I saw books and papers and sketchbooks piling up in the corridor outside your room, but I paid no attention, I did not realize what it meant. I was simply glad that you seemed to have found something to do, whatever it might be. Sometimes I heard you talking loudly through the door, listening to music while you smoked; I saw people coming in the house laden with heavy bags, then afterwards for days you might be gone altogether. I would worry, but you always showed up again eventually and shut yourself up in your room as usual. Everything was fine. You told me nothing about your new life, but there were nights when we came back together, slightly drunk, and we kissed in the stairs leading up to our hideout and made love on the immaculate floor of my mother’s apartment. Sometimes, too, when we came home even later, in the early morning hours, the fragrance of hot milk with honey would be floating all over Amsterdam with the arrival of the cargo ships—only much later did I learn that this odor was due to the huge shipments of soy they transported. Do you remember? We thrilled to the sugary smell, as we opened the front door, young, over-excited, and settled onto the mattress in the living room to doze hand in hand until one of us had the strength to get up and make the morning coffee and start the day. I don’t know why it wasn’t more complicated than that at the time—perhaps, simply, because we were innocent.
