The following night Goosen shook Bosch awake from an exhausted doze to show him a group of men hurrying along with a naked girl carried between them in a quilt employed as a stretcher. She was eight or nine. Agony rocked her head. Her blond hair was firefrazzled and most of the tissue down the right side of her body had blackened and slipped away. To Bosch, she was nothing save glisten and blister and skinned hare. At that moment, she happened to look up briefly, or perhaps only appeared to do so. Their eyes locked, then broke, or maybe not. She was, in any case, it occurred to Bosch as he balanced there beside his big brother, the first unclothed girl he had ever seen.
When his father finally bobbed to the surface again four days later, Bosch's mother pitched forward to shawl herself around his spindly neck, and two thirds of ‘s-Hertogenbosch had subsided into smoldering charcoal knolls of wreckage, more than four thousand homes had been destroyed, three hundred townspeople perished, and Bosch had become himself. In an effort to comprehend what it was he had seen, he soon applied brush to canvas and realized with a jolt that he had learned how to paint. That the purpose of the act was to capture and convey the details of the soul's geography, not the world's. That the world's was worthless, was wind, because the soul was where the only bona fide cosmos breathed.
Bosch began an apprenticeship with his father, but soon moved into the house of a stern wall-eyed master from Mechelen who had established his studio several blocks away. Although Bosch worked diligently, earnestly, people refused to take him more than lightly. He was too young, too boyish, too pleasant for such bleak apparitions. Too prolific to be considered sincere. And his paintings? They were too eccentric, unnerving, cluttered, out of step with custom to be considered worthy of anything approaching serious attention.
It did not ultimately matter to another human being, it dawned on him one day, that Bosch was Bosch, and it never would.
Every Sunday he towed his spirit to church to hunker apart from the others in a pew at the rear, better to despise those around him, wondering why he had made the effort to show up in the first place. When it became inevitable, he grudgingly joined the Brotherhood of Our Lady, not because he felt a lint fluff's weight of devotion to its lessons, but because he knew that joining was what was expected of him, tacitly demanded, the sole means for a businessman like himself to get a leg up in this incestuous city. And that, at the end of the day, he also knew, was all he really was, all he would ever really be: an entrepreneur of bad dreams and devils that no one wanted hanging on their walls. Bosch had the misfortune of reminding the world of itself, and that was something the world simply would neither tolerate nor forgive. There are some things, the world asserted, at which people should not become too accomplished.
Slowly, Bosch came to admit that he would never be famous. He would never be the talk of this town, or any other. The recognition ached like a body full of bruises. He could hardly wait to take his place before his easel every morning to find out what his imagination had waiting for him, yet he had to make peace with the bristly fact that recognition was a boat built for others. He had to content himself with the rush of daily finding — the way milled minerals mixed precisely with egg whites create astounding carmines, creams, cobalts; how the scabby pot-bellied rats scurrying through his feverscapes were not really scabby pot-bellied rats at all, but the lies flung against the true church day after day.
There were, that is, lives behind this life, messages murmuring within nature's minutiae.
Look closely: everything is webbed with everything, existence an illuminated manuscript you walk through.
All you have to do is study.
All you have to do is learn how to read.
And so he prepared to live his life as a bachelor, faithful to his art because he had nothing and no one else to be faithful to. Shortly after informing his shaken parents of his decision, he attended a small dinner party at a well-heeled patron's home. There he met the angular patron's angular daughter, Aleyt Goyaerts van den Meervenne. She was three years his senior, serious as a sermon, beautifully pale, blond as a pearl, frugal as a friar with her words. Her clothes hung off her loosely as they might off two broomsticks fashioned into a cross. Over the course of the meal, Bosch noticed Aleyt evinced the habit of closing her wisterial eyes whenever he addressed her directly, as if she were trying to will him away from her. It took him most of the evening to puzzle out that just the opposite was the case. Aleyt was concentrating on each syllable he spoke because she wanted to understand precisely what he had to say.
In that meeting's wake, they began to court, first in the family sitting room, then strolling through the pinched streets of the city, conversing about music, painting, the quality of cloudy light on snowy mornings when ‘s-Hertogenbosch softens into bluegray reverie.
Bosch opened his eyes fourteen months later to find himself kneeling before an indifferent priest with a chancre on his grim lower lip. A wafer was thawing on Bosch's tongue. The painter was thirty years old and he was deep in the midst of articulating his wedding vows.
Because, he ruminated, attempting to nail down the language of it—
Because—
Because late one motionless autumn afternoon, sitting side by side on a stone wall overlooking the pastures at the town's edge, powdery gilt sun backlighting the dying trees, Aleyt asked Bosch, apropos of nothing, if by chance he had ever considered that he might be holding his painting of the universe upside down.
Bosch had not.
Pressing his hands between hers, staring straight ahead as she spoke, Aleyt suggested in a tender, even voice that he unfasten his mind and heart to the prospect.
Imagine for a moment, just a moment, that the reason the earth-ball is swarmy with transgression lies not in the fact that Man has foundered, failed, fallen, but that he has never risen, flourished, revised his basic constitution in the slightest, has always been, in a word, exactly what he is now: sin lodged in skin.
Imagine, further, she suggested, that the reason is as obvious as the stunning honeyed suffusion across this afternoon's sky. That Satan, not God, is responsible for what we see. The explanation for why you set your eyes upon Lucifer's labor everywhere you look is that there is nothing else to set your eyes upon. What you observe is no illusion, no lamb in lion's clothing, but the genuine shape and heft of things. The globe really is about what it appears to be about: war, crime, bigotry, covetousness, spite, deceit, disorder, sloth, sham, meanness, mischief, misery. Living tallies up in the end to nothing more than ceaseless vinegary letdown. You are promised this. You get that. Without end.
The gold-dust sky, Bosch noticed, consumed three-fourths of his view. If he held up his right thumb sideways just so, he could effectively blot out any one of the sparse trees or slavering cows in the foreground.
Beyond them hazed a large still pond the same hue as the sky, only glassy.
Imagine, in a word, Aleyt pushed on, that this planet is product, not of God's intellect, but The Fiend's fancy. We are living in the devil's dream.
Bosch parted his lips to speak.
Pressed them closed.
The grass was too green by half.
It may not be easy to do so at first, Aleyt said. Such notions go against the grain of our education and predilections. But try, just for the wink of an eye, and you will sense sense start returning to the senselessness surrounding you. Satan, not God, sired what we see. He stole our souls from heaven's radiance and boxed them in these inky containers.
Astonished, Bosch turned to examine her. Aleyt did not return his glance. She was busy examining something on the gauzy horizon that remained imperceptible to him. For Bosch, distance simply gave way to more distance.