Filip was a peaceful, quiet boy. He helped his father on the farm, but it soon became clear that he would not follow in his footsteps. He would not pour milk out every morning and mix it with the powder from calves’ stomachs in order to shape giant wheels of cheese, nor rake out the hay into even piles. He would not observe in early spring whether in the furrows of ploughed earth there hadn’t collected any water. The pastor of Verrebroek made his parents understand that Filip was gifted enough that it would be worth educating him further after he completed his studies at the church school. And thus the fourteen-year-old boy began his education at the Heilige-Drievuldigheids lyceum, where he demonstrated his outstanding ability at drawing.
If it is true that there are people who see the small things, and those who see only big things, then I am certain that Verheyen belonged to that first group. I even think that his body from the beginning felt best in that particular position – inclined over a table, with his legs resting on the bars of his chair, his spine curved into a bow and his hands furnished with a feather pen that took not even the slightest interest in far-reaching goals, aiming close, within the kingdom of detail, the cosmos of little details, dashes and points, where the image is born. Etching and mezzotint – leaving in metal little traces, signs, the drawing of the smooth indifference surface of a metal sheet, ageing it till it became wise. He told me that the obverse always took him by surprise and confirmed his conviction that left and right are two completely different dimensions: their existence ought in fact to show us the suspect nature of what we naively take to be reality.
And although he was so adept at drawing, so occupied with engraving and etching, dyeing and printing, in his twenties Verheyen set out for Leiden to study theology, and like the pastor from Verrebroek, his mentor, become a pastor.
But even earlier – as he told me in connection with that excellent microscope that stood on his table – every so often that pastor would take him on short expeditions, a few miles down battered roads, to see a particular grinder of lenses, a brash Jew cursed out by his own, as he called them. This man rented out rooms in a stone house and seemed so exceptional that each such expedition was for Verheyen a great event, though he was too young to take part in any conversations, which he could only barely understand. The grinder apparently comported himself in a rather exotic, somewhat eccentric manner. He had a long gown, and on his head a tall stiff cap, which he never removed. He looked like a line, like a vertical pointer – so Filip told me and joked that if you were to put that oddball in a field he might serve the people as a sundial. Different people gathered at his house, merchants, students and professors, who would sit around the wooden table beneath a large willow tree and have endless discussions. From time to time the host or one of the guests would give a lecture merely in order to get the discussion to flare up again. Filip recalled that the host spoke as though he were reading, fluidly, without mumbling. He’d build long sentences, the meaning of which would immediately escape the little boy, but the speaker governed them perfectly. The pastor and Filip would always bring something to eat. Their host would supply them with wine, which he lavishly diluted with water. This was as much as Verheyen remembered from these meetings, and Spinoza remained for all time his master, whom he would read and battle fervently. Perhaps it was these meetings with this ordered mind, with his power of thought and need to understand, that prompted young Filip to study theology in Leiden.
I am certain that we cannot recognize the fate grooved into the other side of life for us by the divine Engravers. They must appear to us only once they’ve taken a form intelligible to mankind, in black and white. God writes with his left hand and in mirror writing.
During his second year at university, in 1676, on a May evening, Filip, going up the narrow stairs to the little floor he rented from a certain widow, tore his trousers on a nail, also – as he saw only the following day – harmlessly injuring his calf. A red mark was left on his skin, drawn by the sharp part of the nail, a dash of a few centimetres adorned by drops of blood in little points; the careless movement of the Engraver on the delicate human body. After a few days a fever had begun to consume him.
When the widow finally called the medic, it turned out that the little wound had already been infected; its edges kindled to red and had swollen. The medic prescribed poultices and broth for strength, but already by the next evening it had become clear that there would be no way to stop the process, and that the leg would have to be cut off just below the knee.
‘Not a week goes by that I don’t have to amputate something off someone. You still have another leg,’ the medic apparently said to cheer up Filip. The medic would later become his friend, and he was my uncle, Dirk Kerkrinck, for whom Filip executed quite recently several anatomical engravings. ‘You’ll have a wooden crutch made, and at worst you’ll just be a bit noisier than you have been until now.’
Kerkrinck had been a student of Frederik Ruysch, the best anatomist in the Netherlands, and perhaps the world, so the amputation was an exemplary one and came off perfectly. The part was divided from the whole smoothly, the bone sawed evenly, the blood vessels closed, cauterized precisely with a glowing hot rod. Before the operation, the patient grabbed his future friend by the sleeve and begged him to preserve the removed leg. He had always been very religious, and he must have taken it literally that in our resurrected bodies we would rise from the grave in our physical form, with Christ’s coming. He told me later that at the time he was very fearful that his leg might rise on its own; he wanted his body to be buried, when the time came, as a whole. Had it been an ordinary medic and not my uncle – had it been someone off the street, an ordinary barber-surgeon, the kind who cuts off warts and pulls out teeth – he would not, of course, have fulfilled this bizarre request. Ordinarily the severed limb would travel, shrouded in cloth, to the cemetery, where with solemnity, though with no religious formalities, it would be placed in a small hole, which they wouldn’t even mark out. But my uncle, while the patient slept, knocked out by rectified spirit, took meticulous care of the leg. Above all with the aid of an injection of a substance, the composition of which his master had kept a secret, he removed from the blood and lymphatic vessels all the contaminated blood and infiltrations of gangrene. When the limb had been thus drained, he placed it in a glass vessel filled with a balm of Nantes brandy and black pepper, which was to permanently protect it from destruction. When Filip awoke from his alcoholized anaesthesia, his friend showed him the leg drowned in brandy, just as mothers are shown newborns after giving birth.
Verheyen recuperated slowly, in the attic of a little house down one of the small streets of Leiden, where he was boarding with the widow. It was she who took care of him. Who knows how this would all have ended had she not been there. The patient became quite depressed, as a matter of fact; it’s hard to say whether it was because of the ceaseless pain of the healing wound, or just because of his new situation. At the age of twenty-eight he had, after all, become an invalid, and his theological studies had thus ceased to make sense – without his leg, he could not be a pastor. He did not allow anyone to notify his parents, overwhelmed by shame at disappointing them. Dirk would pay him visits, as well as two colleagues drawn – it seems – less by the suffering of the patient than they were by the presence on his headboard of the amputated limb. It appeared this scrap of the human body was now living its own life as a specimen, submerged in alcohol, in a perpetual haze, dreaming its own dreams of running, of wet morning grass, of warm sand on the beach. A few fellow theology students also came to see him, and to them Filip ultimately confessed that he would not be returning to his studies.