Tulip Fever (17 page)

IT IS THE STRANGEST SENSATION, that Maria is pregnant with my baby. I have stepped into the world of motherhood and I am now noticing children in the street, gazing at them with a maternal interest. In our country we show affection to our offspring; in fact, foreigners remark that we treat them with excessive indulgence. Rather than being consigned to the care of nursemaids, our Dutch children are brought up in the bosom of the family. Opposite my front door, across the canal, the houses catch the sunlight in the morning. A woman brings her child outside. She watches it take its first steps. Along the street the trees are misted green; new life is beginning. She swoops the child up and holds it close. I can hear her laughter, echoing across the canal. This affects me deeply. She is my phantom self with my phantom child. This is the lost life that I should have been leading with my husband. Treacherous water, however, separates us, and I cannot reach her now.

“Lord, this is heavy!” Indoors, Maria attempts to lift a bucket of peat. I take it from her. She giggles. I know she is using me but I do not mind. She must not lose this baby. She is not being attended by a doctor; she only has me. While I have all the attention, she has to cope alone. And it is she who will face, alone, the unimaginable terrors of childbirth. Sometimes, burdened with my lies, I forget this. There is danger ahead for both of us, but only she will bear the pain.

I empty the peat into the box beside the fireplace. My arms ache—it is hard work, being a servant. “Feel my
tieten
—they’re getting bigger.” Maria is two months gone. Ignoring my blushes, she grabs my hand and lays it on her breast. I have never felt her before, so I cannot tell. Besides, she is a buxom girl.

“There’s storks nesting on the chimney down the road,” she says. “That’s good luck.” She is drinking some concoction of cow’s urine and dung; she buys it from an old woman in the market. She is in thrall to country superstitions—around her neck she wears a charm: a walnut shell with a spider’s head inside, to ward off fever. Before, I would have laughed at this—I come from a middle-class, educated family; we were taught to ridicule such things— but now she has drawn me into her world. I want to believe her magic, for only a miracle will see us through. We are bound together by sorcery.

It is May. The evenings are balmy. On warm days the canals stink, but over them drifts the scent of blossoms. In the gardens, tulips sound their silent trumpets; irises have unfurled between their swords. Even the house seems pregnant with new life. On the wall hangs Cornelis’s lute, swollen like a fruit; on the kitchen shelves stand the big-bellied stoneware jars.

RELEASED FROM CORNELIS’S EMBRACES, my passion for Jan grows stronger. I surrender myself to him with my whole heart. Nowadays I visit his studio in broad daylight. Of course I am careful; I make sure nobody sees me slipping through the door. My hood hides my face. But I have grown in confidence. My great deception has made me reckless. One huge lie and I have stepped over a threshold into another world; a criminal must feel this, after he has killed for the first time. And look! I have got away with it. Nobody has found me out, not yet. There is no going back now; I am caught in the momentum of my crime. I feel exhilarated by my wicked success.

Jan shuts his pupil into the kitchen. He has set up a still life for Jacob there, an
ontbijtje
, or breakfast table—half-eaten ham, earthenware mustard pot, grapes. Jacob wants to add a butterfly—“To symbolize the carefree life of the soul,” he says, “after it is free from fleshly desires.”

“Just paint a breakfast,” says Jan.

“What about a peeled lemon, so beautiful, yet sour inside?”

“Just look at what’s on the table,” says Jan. “Look at the luster of the grapes. Isn’t that enough? Find beauty in what you see, not what it can teach us.”

Jacob is an earnest young man. How can he detach objects from their sermonizing properties? To paint earthly beauty, just for itself, is to deny the presence of God. Jacob already considers Jan disreputable. He knows there is something going on between us, and me a married woman. Ah, what would he think if he knew the truth?

Jan closes the door on his pupil. He is going to paint me. He has finished
The Love Letter
. I smuggled it into the house and hid it in the attic. That was his love letter to me, one I will never tear up. Now, in his studio, he paints me naked. I disrobe myself, peeling off my clothes like an onion skin. But the tears in my eyes are caused by happiness.

“Shall I tell you how much I love you?” I ask, lying on the bed. “When I see a leek, my heart leaps. Do you know why?”

“Why, my sweetest heart, my darling love? Move your arm up—there, just like that.”

“Because I was drinking leek soup when I first heard your name.
Jan van Loos, he will make me immortal
.”

“And I will! Leave your husband, Sophia; come and live with me.”

“How can I leave my husband when I am carrying his child?” I laugh.

Jan is shocked. How can I talk so lightly? “Sooner or later you’ll be found out; it’s only a matter of time.”

“Why should I be found out?”

“What’s going to happen when the child is born? Are you going to pass it off as your own and go on living with your husband?”

I cannot contemplate this. I cannot bear to think about the future.

“What are we going to do,” he asks, “now we have started this?”

“If I run away with you, he’ll discover I have been cheating. Besides, where can we go? We cannot stay here, and if we move to another town you will be unable to work; your guild forbids it.” This is true. To protect their members, the Guilds of St. Luke are closed to painters from other towns; they are unable to sell their work until they’ve been established there for several years.

Now it is Jan’s turn to be reckless. “We’ll leave the country. We’ll sail to the East Indies.”

“The East Indies?”

“We’ll escape from this life and start again, you and I— we’ll sail across the world and nobody will be able to reach us.” He clasps me in his arms. “My love, we’ll be happy.”

So the seed is sown. Jan talks about sunshine and ultramarine skies. “Mountains—can you picture them?” He has heard travelers’ tales of the colony. “And trees chattering with parrots. The sun shines all the year round. We won’t need money—besides, what happiness has money brought you? We will lie as naked as God intended under the palm trees and I will rub your beautiful long body with myrrh.”

At this stage it is still a dream—as foreign as the exotic prints my father used to show me. Too many obstacles lie in our path. I look at Jan—his darling face, his wild hair, the red velvet beret crammed on his head; his battered boots, his paint-streaked jerkin. I try to imagine him surrounded by palm trees but my imagination fails me. There are too many oceans to cross.

Meanwhile he paints me:
Woman on a Bed
. I lie there, shivering in the cold. He paints fast, on a wooden panel. He gazes at me as if I am an object—that rapt impersonal gaze I remember from when he painted my portrait. When we speak, however, his face softens; he returns to himself. In his eyes I see one kind of love replaced by another.

Outside stretches the noisy city—bells ringing, horses neighing, carts rattling past. Here all is silent concentration. The water’s reflection ripples on the walls; it dances like my dancing heart. I lie propped on his pillows, on the bed where I have found greater joy than I believed possible. My heart is full. I know that I will leave my husband and come to him; I’ve known this for weeks. In fact, I knew it the moment Jan stepped into my house.

He says: “Whatever happens to us, this painting will not lie. It will tell the truth.”

29

The Painting

To ornament a single piece most dearly ’Tis best by sundry means to improvise Accessories that its deck’d gist revealeth An artful play on art it doth comprise.

—S. VAN HOOGSTRAETEN, 1678

Nearby, in his house in the Jodenbreestraat, Rembrandt, too, is painting a naked woman lying on a bed. Curtains are pulled back to reveal Danaë, dressed only in bracelets, propped on a pile of pillows. She waits for Zeus to descend on her in a shower of golden rain.

The painting is drenched in gold—gold curtains, weeping golden cherub, the golden warmth of the woman’s skin. But where is the rain, and can that approaching lover be truly a god? It looks more like an old servant.

She hangs in the Hermitage, the loveliest nude he has ever painted. But if not Danaë, who is she? She has been
Rachel Awaiting Tobias
; in later years she became
Venus
Awaiting Mars
. She has been
Delilah Awaiting Samson
and
Sara Awaiting Abraham
.

At that time Rembrandt was deeply in love with his young wife, Saskia. Could this just be a woman, radiant with desire, waiting for her husband?

This same year, 1636, Salomon van Ruysdael paints
River Landscape with Ferry
. Livestock is being herded onto a ferry; the water is glassy, reflecting the sky. It is a painting free from mythology—it depicts no souls crossing the Styx, just cows crossing a river to get to better pasture on the other side. It tells no story but its own.

And meanwhile, in Haarlem, Pieter Claesz is painting a
Little Breakfast
—a herring on a pewter plate, a roll, some crumbs. It is a painting of transcendent beauty, with no lessons to be learned. Art for art’s sake.

Painters are simply artisans; they are suppliers of goods. Pictures on a grand theme—history or religious subjects—are sold for the highest prices. Next come landscapes and seascapes, priced according to their detail, then portraits and genre paintings—merry companies, interiors, tavern scenes. Finally, at the bottom of the scale are the still lifes.

Jan’s painting, however, has no value. Its category is immaterial for it is not for sale. He works fast, with bold brush strokes, for soon Sophia must leave and he wants to capture her, now, just as she is. Besides, she is chilly.

Centuries later she will hang in the Rijksmuseum. Scholars will quarrel about her identity. Is she Venus? Is she Delilah? Papers will be published about her place in van Loos’s work. Ordinary people will wonder: who is she? His mistress? A model? Surely not a model, for she gazes out of the painting with such frank love.

She will have no title. She will just be known as
Woman
on a Bed
. Because that is what she is.