Rituals (2 page)

*       *

The Voetboogsteeg bar was long and dark, designed for customers of the Exchange and provincials, low characters too craven to go to the whores and too stingy to keep a mistress. Instead, they came to the divine twilight in this tartan décor bar to peer into Lyda's vast white bosom, a pleasure that had to be paid for with a never-ending stream of creme-de-menthe sodas. That had been the reason he fell in love, that slow river of green liquid disappearing into her wide mouth. That and the silver-grey sprayed, ludicrously tall hairdo, and those large white breasts of which so much and yet too little was visible, and the fact that she was more than a head taller than Inni. "I am all green inside," she used to say periodically, and that, too, excited him.

Since the first, real Lyda, who was not called Lyda but Petra, there had been many Lydas in Inni's life, and because he was not a consistent philosopher, he had several explanations for this. Sometimes it really had something to do with love, but at other times it happened that he regarded himself as a vampire who could live only if he could suck "light" out of women, passersby, or as he put it, undefined feminine beings of the female sex. These brief mountings, these exchanges, these mutual ministrations of almost nameless services, gave him temporarily the feeling that he existed after all. Not that he always found this agreeable. But sometimes, when time seemed never-ending, when the days confused him by their unimaginable duration, when it seemed as if there would always be more hours and minutes than water and air, he would go out into the street like a dog, simply disguising himself as someone in search of sex; and in the evening he would hide himself deeper than ever in Zita's arms. But there were also other times, days in which the hunter allowed himself to be hunted, times when objects were not so emphatically present and when he did not immediately, on seeing a car, think car, when the days did not hang around him like empty, never-to-be-filled vessels. At such times he was ecstatic. He would walk about the city as if he could fly, and abandon himself to anyone laying claim to a brief possession of Inni Wintrop.

Zita had no part in all this. He had decided that insofar as the world existed, and therefore he, too, he would have to obey Zita's code, which was a simple one: whatever he did, she did not want to know about it, since otherwise she would be obliged to kill him, and that would be of no benefit to anyone.

Suddenly, in the year we are talking of, it became November. Inni sold a small plot of land still left from his inheritance from his guardian, dined with the estate agent in the Oyster Bar, took Zita to a friend in Amsterdam South, and then offered Lyda a creme de menthe. "I'm seeing you home tonight," he said, deciding that this was a proper Amsterdam approach. "Are you now," she said, cocking her head like a parrot that wants to hear that same funny noise again. She took another sip, and as he saw the green liquid slithering in, Inni felt a slow excitement rising up from his toes.

Lyda lived in West. After the menthe, there had been the equally unending staircase to her attic, which had excited him immensely, and finally the room itself with the cane chair, the Nescafe, the marigolds, the coconut mat, and the framed portrait of her father, a bald Lyda, looking down suspiciously from the realm of the dead into the room, to see whom she had brought home this time. Inni found it touching, the nakedness of someone he had never seen naked before. The fact that you could, with a few moves of the hand, somewhere in a wooden bird's nest on some floor or other in a nameless neighbourhood, reduce a fully dressed, upright-walking stranger to the most natural state, that the person who a few moments earlier had been sitting in an espresso bar leafing through Elsevier was now lying naked beside you in a bed that had never existed before, though it had been in existence for years - if there was anything that could ward off death, blindness, and cancer, this was it.

Lyda was large and white and soft and full, and after the predictable course of events during which she had called out for her mother, the two of them looked like a failed attempt at flying, something sweaty that had crashed. Both of them were covered in a silvery layer of lacquer from her hair, which, after they had unpinned the candy-floss web, hung down to her hips. They lay still for a time. In accordance with the rules, Inni was sad. As he let the embrace with the bigger Lyda seep away into his memory gap, he felt, as usual, bitter at what was bound to happen next. They would disentangle themselves, maybe wash, he would descend the long staircase like someone descending a staircase, she would fall asleep in her own nest, tomorrow she would drink creme de menthe again, with idiots, and they would die, each one separately, in different hospital beds, ill treated by young nurses who were not yet born.

*       *

He groped behind him on the floor where, before getting into bed, he had seen a packet of Caballeros. As he half-raised himself and Lyda began to grunt softly under him, he suddenly looked into Zita's eyes. Paper eyes, but still Zita's. It was the photograph from
Taboo,
spread over two pages. Now, thought Inni, I am in Pompeii. The lava is pouring over me, and I shall stay like this forever. A man, half on top of a woman who, in the unthinkable "later", no one will know was not his wife, his head raised and looking at something that had become invisible forever. What he felt was sorrow. A hundred times he had seen this photograph, but now it was as if behind this portrait pinned to the brown wallpaper with four drawing pins, there was a universe consisting only of Zita, which he would never be able to inhabit again. But what was it? Cool, green eyes cut from impenetrable stone. Had they ever looked at him with love? Her mouth stood slightly open as if she were about to say something, or had just said something that would forever put an end to Zita and Inni — a Namibian curse, an annihilating, soft-sounding formula. It would wipe out the juxtaposition of their ridiculous names and would banish him forever from her life, not only from the time that was still to come — that would be just bearable — but also from times already past, so that what had existed would then no longer exist. For eight years he would simply not have been there! He looked more and more intently at the paper face that every second changed further into an unfamiliar, rebuffing mask. There was no doubt that it saw him and therefore excluded him, because it was at the same time looking at someone else with the love that was no longer intended for him but for the only other person she had been looking at while the photograph was taken — the photographer.

"Nice noodle, that girl's got," said Lyda. She sat up. He saw that her breasts were now silver, too. The stuff was everywhere, on his face, his chest, her face, everywhere!

He stood up, saw his silver figure walk past the mirror, and got dressed.

"I don't want to get used to you," said Lyda, and it sounded like a point of order at a meeting.

He waved to the silvery, now suddenly tearstained blotch of her face and went out into the street of silent, death-feigning houses with their sleeping people. He drove straight to the city park and by a pond tried to wash the silver, the outward sign of his removal from Zita's life, from his hands. But he did not succeed, and it only became worse. Five o'clock passed. Nature, in which animals do not know one another and no one loves anyone, awakened.

A photographer, he thought, and remembered that he had first met Zita at a photographic exhibition, standing in front of a portrait of herself. He had seen the photo before he had seen her, and he did not know who betrayed whom, the woman in the photograph, the woman who stood before it, or the other way around. Some photographs, like that famous one of Virginia Woolf at the age of twenty, in which she looks sideways, are so perfect that the living being they represent seems a fabrication, something made so that a photograph may be taken of it. Inni had realized that if he wished to become acquainted with the woman in the photograph, he would have to address the woman standing in front of it, and this he had done. The photo hung in a rather dark corner, but he had at once been sucked towards it. Power emanated from it. It seemed as if that face, which could never really belong to a living human, had existed for thousands of years, independent of all else and completely absorbed in itself — an equilibrium.

He remembered clearly that he had begun to feel slightly dizzy as he approached her. She had walked away from her portrait, which made it easier, and stood by a window, a very soft layer of light all around her, alone. She had the total equanimity of someone who had been made solely to be different from the others without ever being conscious of it, a different order of being that consisted of only one member — her. And so he had entered her world without ever becoming a member of it, and he had wrought damage in it while refreshing himself on the perfect equilibrium. And now he was about to be punished for it.

Slowly it grew lighter. He shivered with cold. A large heron flew over, lurched, and then landed in the reeds with clattering wing movements. For the rest all was silent, and it seemed to Inni as if he were standing still for the first time, as if since that first meeting with Zita he had never stopped walking and had come all the way here in one long haul, in one movement, in order to stand by this pond with silver smudges on his hands and, who knows, on his face, too. He decided not to remove them and to go home at once.

If everything he was thinking was true, he would have to be punished now, and the sooner the better. Nothing was sure any longer. This, then, was chaos, and chaos was what frightened him most in life — the chaos into which he would be flung back if she left him.

*       *

It did not turn out the way he had thought. Of course Zita was in love with the photographer and of course she had slept with him. He had been her first man since she had been with Inni, just as Inni had been the first man in her life. With the absolute certainty of someone who lives by laws, she now knew she would have to leave Inni, and because she loved him and knew of his dread of chaos, this grieved her. But there was nothing to be done about it. It would happen the way it happens in Namibia, without a sound, swiftly, and without a single crack in the crystal. She kissed him when he came in, said that she had something to wash off that funny silver with, helped him remove it, stood close against him, and took him into bed with her. Never had he loved her so much. He would have liked to push first his head and only then all the rest right inside her and stay there forever. But when it was all over and she was asleep like a newborn sister of Tutankhamun, so terrifyingly still as if she had not breathed for centuries, as if she had not only such a short while before been a frenzied, shouting maniac, he knew that he had discovered nothing about his fate.

She was absent, as he had been all these years. He got up and took a sleeping tablet from his stock. But when he awoke in the early afternoon, she was still the same as in the morning, as last year and the year before — a marsh of perfection into which anyone who ventured too far for the first time would drown.

The weeks passed. Zita saw her Italian, slept with him, let herself be photographed by him. And each time another photo was taken, another fleck of Inni dissolved into the air of Amsterdam. The new love was the crematorium of the old. So it happened that one day, as Inni was walking across the Koningsplein, a speck of ash floated into his eye which would not come out until Zita licked it away with the tip of her tongue and said he did not look well.

*       *

That was one Friday afternoon, and what was to happen next had little to do with Italians and with love, but rather with a subterranean, unwritten Namibian law mysteriously handed down through the ages — a law according to which accounts must be settled once every eight years, but then for good on a Friday afternoon. On such afternoons there must be men in that country who are doomed to die a terrible death. But as with so many ancient customs, the sharper edges had worn away in the diaspora. Inni would be banished, but that it would happen on this particular day he did not know. Zita had made her calculations and she no longer belonged to Inni. That day she would leave for Italy with her Italian, who like her had no money. What would happen there she did not know, and she somehow had a feeling that it did not concern her. It would happen, that was what mattered.

After she had licked the speck from Inni's eye, he sat down at his desk. He had an hour and a half to hand in his horoscope at
Het Parool
for
the Saturday supplement. He leafed through
Marie Claire, Harper's Bazaar, Nova,
and his books of stars. He copied something here, invented something there, and busied himself with the destinies of other people because they were going to read it. When he arrived at his own constellation, Leo, he had just read in
Harper's
that things would go well with him and in
Elle
that the outlook was gloomy. He put down his pen and said to Zita, who had lain down on the sofa by the window in order to look out over the Prinsengracht for the last time, "Why are you never allowed to write, Dear Cancer, you will get cancer, or Leo, something dreadful will happen to you today, your wife will leave you and you will commit suicide?" Zita knew he was now thinking of his aunt and of Arnold Taads, and the green of her eyes darkened, but he did not notice and chuckled. She turned her head towards him and looked at him. A total stranger was sitting at a desk, grinning. She laughed. Inni stood up and went towards her. He stroked her hair and wanted to lie down beside her.

"No," she said, but this in itself meant nothing. It could be part of a game in which she had to, or wanted to, taunt him or in which he had to tell her a story.

"This time you have to pay," she said. That was not new either. He felt a great desire rising in him.

"How much?" he asked.

"Five thousand guilders."

He laughed. Five thousand guilders. He unbuttoned her blouse. The most he had ever paid her was a hundred guilders. They always had to laugh at that. Usually they would lie on top of the bank note so that they could hear it rustling. She always showed him later what she had bought with it, or she invited him out to dinner somewhere, and once she had, with her serenest look, walked into the house of a whore in the red-light district and had handed over the money without a word.