Tulip Fever (4 page)

—LEONARDO DA VINCI, Notebooks

“Fish again?” Cornelis looks at the plate. “All this week we have eaten fish. Last week too, if I remember rightly. Soon we will be sprouting fins.” He chuckles at his own joke. “Much of our country once lay underwater—are you returning us to that element?”

“Sir,” says the maid, “I thought you liked fish. This is bream, your favorite.” She indicates Sophia. “She’s prepared it with prunes, the way you prefer it.”

He turns to his wife. “How about a nice piece of pork? Visit the butcher tomorrow, my love, before we are all transformed into the scaly denizens of the deep.”

Maria snorts—with laughter or contempt, he cannot tell—and goes back to the kitchen. The impertinence! Since Karel, the manservant, left, standards have been slipping; Cornelis must talk to his wife about it.

Sophia does not eat. She looks at her wineglass and says: “I don’t want that painter back in the house.”

“What did you say?”

“I don’t want him here. I don’t want us to have our portrait painted.”

He stares at her. “But why not?”

“Please!”

“But why?”

“It’s dangerous,” she says.

“Dangerous?”

She pauses. “We are just—pandering to our own vanity.”

“So what are you pandering to, my love, when the dressmaker visits?”

“That’s not the same—”

“How many hours do you spend on fittings, twisting this way and that in front of the mirror?” He leans across the table and strokes her wrist. “I am glad you do, my sweetheart, for it fills my old heart with joy to see your beauty. That is the reason I want to preserve that bloom on canvas—do you understand?”

She fiddles with the hem of the tablecloth. “It’s too expensive. Eighty florins!”

“Cannot I spend my money how I choose?”

“Eighty florins is many months’ wages for—say—a carpenter. . . .” She falters. “A sailor.”

“Why is this suddenly a concern of yours?”

There is another silence. Then she says: “I don’t like him.”

“He seems a pleasant enough fellow.”

She looks up, her face pink. “I don’t like him—he’s impudent.”

“If you truly dislike the man—why, I’ll pay him off and find another.” Cornelis wants to please her. “There’s Nicholaes Eliasz or Thomas de Keyser. They have many commissions; we might have to bear with a delay. I could even approach Rembrandt van Rijn, though the prices he charges might stretch even my means.” He smiles at her. “Anything to make you happy, my dearest heart.”

Relieved, he eats. So that was all it was. Women are strange creatures with such funny little ways. How tricky they are, compared with men. They are like a puzzle box— you have to twist a dial here, turn a key there, and only then will you unlock their secrets.

Cornelis loves his wife to distraction. Sometimes, caught in the candlelight, her beauty stops his heart. She is his hope, his joy, the spring in his step. She is a miracle, for she has brought him back to life when he had given up hope. She rescued him, just as he himself, in another way entirely, rescued her.

After dinner Cornelis puts another slab of peat on the fire, sits down and lights his pipe.
A man’s greatest comfort is
a happy home, where he can enjoy the attentions of a loving wife
. Sophia, however, is absent. Her footsteps creak across the ceiling. Then there is silence. She said she had a headache and retired early. Usually she sits with him and sews; sometimes they play cards together. Tonight she has been restless, as jumpy as a mare sensing a thunderstorm. That outburst about the painter was most uncharacteristic.

Cornelis worries that she is falling ill; she looked pale this evening. Maybe she is missing her family. She has few friends here in Amsterdam, and the wives of his own acquaintances are a great deal older than she is. She does not go out enough; she does not enjoy herself. When they were first betrothed Sophia was a lively, happy girl, but over the months she has grown more withdrawn. Maybe it is caused by the responsibilities of running this household—they must employ another servant. Perhaps his wife feels trapped in this house, like the goldfinch he kept in a cage when he was a boy.

Cornelis knocks out his pipe and gets to his feet. His joints ache; his back hurts. It has been a long winter. He feels the weight of the fog outside, weighing down on the city like the lid of a
hutspot
cauldron. He feels his age.

He locks up. He blows out the candles, all except one, which he carries upstairs. The smell of cooked fish still lingers in the house. Yesterday a whale was washed up on the beach at Beverwijk. It was a huge creature, the largest ever measured in that area. The local people were thrown into turmoil. It was an unnatural omen, a portent of disaster—a monster vomited up by the ocean to punish them for their sins.

Cornelis is aware that this is simpleminded. He knows this from his own experience. Tragedy does not take its cue from nature’s eruptions; it strikes at random. No shattering mirror caused the death of his first dear wife, Hendrijke, when she was barely forty. No conjunction of the stars caused his two babies to die in infancy.

For Cornelis has already lost one family. Like all the bereaved, he knows that the world is senseless. They know this in their hearts, even though they tell others, and themselves, that it is God’s will. He performs his pious duty. Each night he reads to Sophia from the Bible; they bow their heads in prayer. On Sunday he visits his church and she attends a secret Mass, for her religion is tolerated as long as it is celebrated in private. He feels, however, that he is mouthing the words like a fish. His world offers no vocabulary for doubt. He has not admitted it in so many words to himself. All he knows is that loss has weakened rather than reinforced his faith, and the only sure thing to which he can cling lies here in his featherbed.

Cornelis enters the bedchamber. Sophia is kneeling in prayer. This surprises him; he thought she was already in bed. She must have been praying for some time. When she sees him she starts. She crosses herself and climbs up into the bed, where she lies staring at the ceiling. From the beam hangs her paper bridal coronet, dusty now, like a wasps’ nest.

Deep in the bed she sighs and shifts. She exhales the fragrance of youth. Desire warms his old bones; it spreads through his cold, sluggish bloodstream. He undresses, empties his bladder into the chamber pot and pulls on his nightshirt. This bed is his life raft; each night her firm young arms save him from drowning.

Sophia lies curled up, her head buried in the pillows. She is pretending to sleep. He blows out the candle and climbs into bed. He pulls up her shift and cups her small breast in his hand. He kneads the nipple. “My dear wife,” he whispers. He guides her hand down to his shrunken member. “My little soldier’s dozy tonight. Time to report for duty.”

Her fingers are clenched. He uncurls them and places them around his flesh; he moves her hand up and down. “Time for battle . . .” His member stiffens; his breathing grows hoarse. “Stand to attention, sir,” he mutters; it is a little joke he shares with his wife. Opening her legs, he eases himself into position. She shudders, briefly, as he pushes himself in. Burying his face in her hair, he cups her buttocks in his hands and presses her against him as the bedsprings creak rhythmically. His breathing quickens as he slides in and out.

Minutes pass. As he grows older it takes longer to spill his seed. When he is flagging he remembers an incident from his past; its wickedness never fails to inflame him. He is a boy back in Antwerp and the family maidservant, Grietje, comes to say good night. Suddenly she lifts her skirts and puts his hand between her legs. He feels wiry hair and damp lips. She moves his fingers; the lips slide together like thick slices of beef. She pushes his finger against what feels like a marble, hidden in the slippery folds of her flesh; she makes him rub it . . . up and down, harder and harder. . . . Suddenly her thighs clamp together, trapping his hand. She groans. Then she pulls out his hand, laughs, slaps his face and leaves.

At the time he was frightened. Terrified, in fact. Disgusted and ashamed. He was only ten years old. His damp fingers smelled of brine and a faint aroma of rotting melons. Remembering it, however, works its magic. He trembles at his own wickedness—ah, but it excites him too. “It’s coming . . . it’s coming . . . fire the cannons!” he whispers and suddenly he is pumping his seed inside her. He grips her flesh in a final spasm; his thin shanks shiver. And then he collapses, spent, his old heart hammering against his ribs. “Praise be to God,” he pants.

Sophia lies beneath him without stirring. She seems to be speaking. He can hear her voice but not the words; his heart is pounding in his ears.

“What did you say, my love?”

“I said, I have changed my mind.” She turns her face from his and buries it in the pillow. “What I told you at dinner . . . I have changed my mind. I don’t want another painter.” She pauses. “Let that man come back.”

6

Maria

Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret places is pleasant.

—JACOB CATS, Moral Emblems, 1632

Down below, in her bed in the wall, Maria sleeps. On the floor she has laid her shoes upside down to keep away the witches. Outside, the canal exhales its chill breath into the air.

The fog has cleared. The moon slides out from behind a cloud and shines on the rows of houses that line the Herengracht. They are rich people’s houses, built to last; their brick gables rear into the sky. Sightlessly, their windows shine in the moonlight. Between them lies the canal. A breeze ruffles the water; it creases like satin. Far away a dog barks—first one and then another, spreading like news of the outbreak of war, a war that only the dogs know is approaching.

The night watchman tramps through the streets. He blows his horn, announcing the hour, but Maria snores in the childless house. She dreams that the rooms fill up with water, and her master and mistress, locked in their curtained bed, float away. The sea rises and submerges the city but now she is a fish swimming through the rooms. Look, I can breathe! She is free while all the others drown—all but her babies. A flickering shoal, they swim behind her. They dart here and there, suspended above the checkerboard marble floors.

Maria smiles, mistress of her underwater palace. Others have died so that she can live, and in the world of dreams this seems perfectly fitting.

7