Will, стр. 7
A few years before you were born I had already considered writing down my experiences. I’ll tell you how that came about. It’s 1993. I’m sitting in my study, which looks out over City Park, and sorting out my papers. Not really. I’m actually just pretending to sort them out. In the next room your great-grandmother is lying on our bedspread, crying. I’m finding it an enormous strain. Powerlessness is exhausting. It cuts someone like me off from everything. Of course, I know why she’s crying. I just don’t want to feel it. I don’t want to think about it. And more than anything else, her tears make this the last place in the world I want to be. Anyway, it’s almost noon. There’s no food in the house. I’m hungry and my wife is definitely not planning on doing anything about it, even if I had the gall to ask her. I feel like some potted meat, duck rillettes to be precise, and I know a good butcher’s in Carnot Straat. The main thing is to get away from here, because I can’t bear another second of her wailing. The city has let itself be crowned European Capital of Culture and posters everywhere are celebrating the fact. If anyone had asked my opinion regarding which image to use, I would have pleaded the case for Mad Meg. It’s a miracle you can see this extraordinary painting by Breughel the Elder here in a small room in a small gallery. That alone shows who we are in this city and the painting itself is just as revealing: naked terror in plain sight, plunder at the mouth of hell. Having it right in front of your face doesn’t make a revelation any less a revelation. Mad Meg rages and rants through an insane landscape full of war and memories, rendered in bright reds, blacks and browns. Eyes wide to see everything and nothing. Has she caused this horror or is she just caught up in the general bastardry and going along with it? You should go to that art gallery one sunny Saturday and take it all in. True, you can see it on the Internet and kids of your generation always find more than they search for. Go and see the painting itself and then look up how this revelation came to be hanging here. Maybe then, with your own brain-power alone, you’ll work out why it says so much about this city. But fine, back to 1993, when a poster with a photo of Laurel and Hardy as jailbirds was thought enough to herald a year of culture. They look crestfallen, as only they can. It’s obvious that they’ve just tried to dig a tunnel only to end up back in their own cell. I look at them and recognize myself. Blazoned above their daft faces is the question ‘Can art save the world?’ Get stuffed, I think. I want toast with duck rillettes. But at the end of Quellin Straat I don’t turn right towards Carnot Straat. I’m suddenly thirstier than I am hungry and keep going to the Geuzen Gardens, the square that only gets called that by the city’s most elderly residents, where there used to be four public gardens, each with a handsome statue of a renowned painter or notorious mayor in the middle and surrounded by trees that once shaded infatuated couples, who sat under them to hold hands. Now it’s always full of choking buses waiting to get a mass of day-trippers back home as fast as possible. There on the corner, on one side of the opera, is a large café with pillars that flaunt its faded elegance, a place I sometimes go to meet my old friends. It’s around 11 a.m. I’ve hardly set foot in the place before somebody’s calling, ‘Look what the cat’s dragged in.’ A few old mates of mine are sitting in the middle of the dining room playing cards. I’m glad to see them, glad that I won’t have to sit at a table by myself like some kind of sad pot plant while I drink and reduce beer mats to little molehills of torn cardboard out of sheer boredom. Richard—built like a brick shithouse and a pal of mine, who, little over a year later, would be discharged from hospital with a plastic bag on the outside of his body instead of a stomach, and then carry it round with him like a walking skeleton for another six months before taking it with him into his grave—beckoned. Another one of the card players is called Leo. Since finding out that I’m a poet, the twerp has been addressing me as ‘Maestro’, half surly and half serious. He’s actually only known for a year or two, after I’ve been publishing for forty bloody years, but his attitude is typical of this city, as typical as it gets. I only vaguely know the other two. I sit down at their table and order a beer. They’re playing whist, a game I’ve never really understood. I sip my beer and look around. ‘Diamonds trumps!’ Richard shouts and winks at me while wiping the froth out of the tash that has won him honorary membership of the local Moustache Club, something he prides himself on. At that moment I’m already over seventy, but the salutary proximity of these card players reduces me to a child. It doesn’t last long. Between tricks Richard asks if I’ve seen Lode. He