Will, стр. 12

On a Sunday morning at ten o’clock I’m standing at the door of a closed shop on Plantin en Moretus Lei with cold knees and my French books under one arm. The door opens and a smart woman in her sixties purses her cherry-red lips and asks if I’m the Wils boy. Inside there is a smell of fine leather. I have to take off my shoes. Everything is excruciatingly tidy. Somewhere deep in the house I hear the screech of a parrot (Gaspar, as I learn later, a creature best given a wide berth). ‘Just go upstairs, child, my son is expecting you.’ The stairs creak. An open door at the top reveals a study with books arrayed behind green glass. Tobacco smoke as thick as fog over a marsh. I give a little knock. ‘Knock, knock,’ I hear immediately, ‘ça doit être le petit seigneur Wilfried, n’est-ce pas? Mais entrez, bonhomme, entrez.’ Around the corner, stretched out on a threadbare chaise longue, Felix Verschaffel is chewing on a pipe. He asks me to hand him my textbooks and indicates a chair. He is wearing a brown three-piece suit; his bulging eyes betray a temper and his meticulously trimmed goatee makes his face look even meaner. He turns page after page, sometimes sighing, sometimes chortling. ‘What’s your teacher’s name?’ he finally asks without looking at me. ‘What? Goetschalckx? One of the Paarden Markt Goetschalckxes, I suppose. Not Cyriel? I thought so. The whole family’s two-faced. His brother’s called Robert. A lawyer… of course. Only two things need to be well greased, you know… Well? Spit it out, Master Wilfried! What needs to be well greased? Cartwheels and lawyers, jeune homme. Remember that. Anyway. We are going to converse with each other in French as much as possible, is that understood? Which is to say, I speak and you listen. This here…’ He tosses my books onto a side table stacked with newspapers. ‘This is not French. It is not alive. If you want to master a language, you have to leap feet first into le fleuve culturel. You have to get drenched head to toe in love for the suppleness of this highly civilized language. Our heartfelt love for our mother tongue does not prevent us from keeping a maîtresse. You should see your face right now. You don’t get that last bit, do you? I see you thinking: Does he mean “mattress”? And yes, sometimes that too. A maîtresse can be a mattress…’ Meanbeard smirks and knocks his pipe out into the overfilled ashtray. ‘But those are vulgarities and we’re not going to get into that now.’ He reaches behind him for a book, while using his other hand to pour a purplish liqueur into the smallest glass I have ever seen. Without trembling, he fills it to the brim. Just as I too, after spending several Sundays with Meanbeard, will be filled to the crown with intoxicating poison. Without looking at me, he says, ‘We will begin with Les chants de Maldoror, written by Isidore Ducasse, better known as the Comte de Lautréamont…’

Look that up on your computer, son. Or better still, let me write down the beginning of that book for you. In translation at least, because I suspect that the apple never falls far from the tree and, for now at least, your French is probably as execrable as mine was then.

May heaven grant that the reader, emboldened and momentarily as fierce as what he is reading, not lose his way, but find a wild, untrodden path through the desolate morass of these dark, poisonous pages…

It hits me like a slap in the face. Angelo feels the earth move and both he and I know that my balls are trembling too. It’s 1937.

Weeks later I again walk the now-familiar route from Kruik Straat, where I live with my parents in a somewhat rundown house, to Plantin en Moretus Lei and my miracle worker’s study.

‘How are your marks, jeune homme?’

‘Better.’

Meanbeard’s bulging eyes are like two black mirrors. Not everything disappears into them, but enough. ‘You can’t fool me. Definitely not with un coeur encore assez simple like yours.’ A stab in my apparently still-too-simple heart. I thought I was already depraved, but apparently more patience is required.

‘I have my report here if you’d like to see it.’

‘Bravo. Now I believe you.’

My stuttering is over. Gone from one day to the next. Thinking back on those days I see myself as a rambler, lost and treading on the spot. Meanbeard lifted up the overhanging branches and revealed a path. That was all it took. I could walk on.

He tells me he saw my father last Saturday. I saw Father leaving that day. He refused to say where he was going, only that he would be late home. It turns out he was in some village in the Campine, together with my temporary tutor and many others beside.

‘We were in the Royal.’

‘Knocking them back…’

He chuckles. ‘Definitely. And we had a good laugh too. It was a special evening I organized with some friends, right in the devil’s heartland. I thought it was a shame he hadn’t brought you along and I told him as much.’

‘Now I think it was a shame too.’

‘That whole village is full of beautiful houses. English style, more or less. Did you know there’s a synagogue there? In the middle of the Campine… The place is lousy with Israelites. We had an entertainer come. The terrace was packed. You should have heard the things he came up with. He came on stage with a big fake nose, just like one of those people. We almost pissed ourselves right then and there. Humour is a weapon, my friend. All those Shlomos and Isaacs and whatever-elses heard our laughter echoing all the way into those big fancy shacks of theirs.’

Meanbeard slaps his right leg hard, braying with laughter. He even has to pull out a hankie because of the