Here's where I find myself. I now know that a bighearted person, in het Nederlands, is small-hearted, that the Holy Ghost and your basic pigeon roosting in the carillon bear the same name,that pijp uitkloppen, to clean out one's pipe, is to form a geslachtsgemeenschap, a "sex community" (the official term is even funnier than the euphemism. But then, "intercourse" is pretty funny at etymological level). Lenen is both to borrow and to lend, making it hard to translate Polonius. I've had my first Dutch dream: I stopped a wimpled woman in a begijnhof in some forgotten Belgian town and asked, "Is dit de weg naar de zestiende eeuw?" Roughly: Show me the way to the Renaissance.
I've brought my en face French partway back from the dead, although you'd be surprised at how little Racine contributes to an exchange in your basic Wallonia pâtisserie. In the tongue of the dreaded Hun, I begin to take a special delight in imbedding clauses and dropping fat, daylight verbal runs at sentence end. I can now read museum tags anywhere in Northern Europe, although a disturbing number are already in imperial Engels. Toward our Frenchified Anglo-Saxon, the whole continent seems to have developed a strange love-hate. Everyone wants to speak the language of power, but secretly, not far below the surface, runs the widespread conviction that ieder Engels is verschrikkelijk.
Thus a little protective coloration helps. Not that I can always pass. I asked directions from a díke-obsoleted fisherman up in Enkhuizen, and following his directions to the letter, found myself halfway out in the Zuider Zee. I had to know where I'd gone wrong, so I retraced my steps, found the fellow, and told him exactly what had happened. 'You followed the directions fine," he told me. "We always send you Germans into the water."
My tutor assures me that research shows that a core vocabulary of a thousand words will get one through 75 percent of ordinary conversation. Unfortunately tempera, patina, pigment, brushstroke, etc. tend not to be among the core one thousand. I have thus become adept at compound neologism. I learn nouns daily, but the arbitrarily of gender makes any decent American yearn for the syllogistic cleanliness of COBOL.
Everything I do all day depends on conversion. Exchange rates, distances. The visual road sign codes — supposedly in Universal Icon Language — are more inscrutable than I imagined. I swear to God there's one indicating that something up ahead is about to put your vehicle into a condition of religious bliss. I take no joy in driving a car, even one dangerously close to the kind Shriner clowns pile out of, in any country where mirrors on building walls assist you to take otherwise blind 90-degree turns at 90 km/h. But I am, at least, marginally better off than the Midwesterner on the Autobahn who kept wondering why he couldn't find this place Ausfahrt on the map.
All my primary sources are written in literary figures nobody has used for centuries. A greater competence than I'll ever possess would still not admit me into the real private clubs. Believe me, every backwater here has its secret speech. The more common the item, the more likely that the villager two kilometers down gives it a different name. That good Dr. Browne was right: jabbering is a hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole world.
The hardest code to break out here — not recorded in any grammar — is greeting kisses. Every dorp has its own dialect. Do I kiss this woman one, two, three, or four times? Do I start on the left cheek or the right? Do I kiss this guy? They don't put this stuff in the Michelin. The exchange frequently leads to jarred eyeglasses and bruised noses. There's a similar dance to find a common denominator language for conversation. Observe clothes, ported books, license plate. Try a few mumbled words. I overheard two men in the Liège (Luik, Luttich) railway station conclude, after halting negotiation, that their strongest common language was Latin. A Belgian friend's advice: if you need to address someone in Brussels and can't tell whether to use French or Vlaams, speak English and walk away healthy.
The whole EC is one, huge, macaronic verse. Who invented all these ways of saying? Does the proliferation of dialects come from innate dissatisfaction with any one set of tools? Or is it just another case of Us having to distinguish ourselves from Them? Even folk songs propagate like viruses. When one is struck up in a café, I can generally sing along, although I must substitute my cowboy stanzas for the local lyric. In any case, I'm proud of what modest Dutch I've gotten beneath the knee (under the belt). I manage a bit like that pooch I had as a child, who could sit, lie down, beg, jump, roll over, and play dead, but not necessarily to the right command. I know just enough' to get me in trouble with the "strange police," who did not believe that an American could really be writing a thesis on a four-hundred-year-old Flemish nonentity. They were on the verge of quizzing me on Rubens's dates before giving me the visa.
Herri hangs around my neck. I still can't say I know the first thing about the man. I've spent weeks in million-volume libraries, half a dozen first-rate art history collections, and no end of regional stadhuizen, and have turned up only the tip of already familiar evidence. Bles's life span remains, despite Yankee ingenuity, framed in question marks. I've nailed down an account of Patinir, with a suggestion that Bles was the older man's nephew or cousin. Fault Flemish; neef means either. What to do when one language has two words that the other smears into a single concept? Modalities continue to elude me: two kinds of forgetting, living, believing, remembering. Two distinct becauses! My attempts to read primary sources are humbling lessons in how enormously my own thoughts are bound in native lexicon. Whatever I call a thing, it is never quite what I've called it. It's miraculous that my mother tongue allows me to realize even that much.
I've come across a source that confuses my man's dates with his cousin-uncle's. (I remember, two years ago, your take on those art-jargon letters fl. "How beautiful; it doesn't matter when the man lived — he flourished around 1542." Believe me: half the charm of this European supermarket raid is imagining what you would make of the Leuven town hall.) Met de Bles, or Blesse. Topknot. How's about Middle High Dutch: with the Blaze. An accident of health left a livid mark across his forehead. Or I could fake a theory: Blesse, a bleeding in of the French wound. Where's my co-conspirator when I need her?
You want to know whether I have any new angle on the paintings themselves. The most convenient conclusion would be that met de Bles was actually a pseudonym, a composite of student panelists from Patinir's workshop, an art factory at least partly documented. I've hunted down a dozen panels. In the paintings themselves (all that's left of Herri, now that his blaze has faded), nothing but the trace of competence — a jagged line, an apprentice, conventional, narrow use of color, a formulaic compositional sense. None is more than marginally memorable except the occasional pastoral arrangement with, somewhere in the background, the chance catastrophe — the painted town in the nonchalant process of being lost.