“Yes, and its trump card at a most particular moment is the indivisible First Person Plural. He was a horny man, wasn’t he? Always ready, even when the circumstances, physically speaking, weren’t exactly ideal. Advanced pregnancy, raging hangover, once the two of us had a real flu …”
“Well, speaking for myself, I had good experiences with the flu. There’s no better aphrodisiac than one or two degrees of fever, damp sheets, and a red-hot pillow. ‘I’ve brought thyme syrup and a bottle of champagne,’ he said once, when I’d spent quite a while in bed waiting for a solicitous husband, and he crawled in with me under the covers, shivering slightly, with aching joints, swollen membranes, and a raw throat.”
“The sun shone through the bedroom window, the top half of which was made of lead glass and colored everything around us cinnabar red. Free-hanging tendrils of black ivy swayed in the breeze outside the windowpanes.”
“But the craziest thing I remember is when he had his traffic accident. Right-of-way ignored when turning left from the Amstel to the Berlage Bridge. ‘Come here, lie down close for a moment, I’m so cold from the sheer fright.’ He pushed back the covers and I couldn’t understand how he had managed all three flights of stairs on his own or how the ambulance crew from Onze Lieve Vrouwe Gasthuis could have let him go. I took off my clothes and lay down, being careful of the blue-purple bruises on his hips; there was a big, white, unbelievably imposing bandage round his knee. It makes you feel quite instinctively guilty. And why wasn’t I at home when he was delivered by a taxi, so wounded and pathetic, and rang his own front doorbell? Soon my hand wasn’t the only thing that disappeared under the covers — my head did too. I wanted to do something, anything at all. That’s just the way it is, isn’t it? Something, blindly, no matter what, it’s our way of rebelling against the outrage of our human powerlessness. I kissed all his grazed and swollen places and reached out my hand—”
“The way every woman does automatically.”
“—for that particular living swelling in the middle, to check the state of my husband’s faith in the world. So, I was holding my husband’s rudder and we were already heading for the sluice, when at a certain point I became uneasy. Shouldn’t I look to see what the patient’s moans were signifying? I slid back out, and his eyes lit up. ‘I know what you like best is you underneath and me on top,’ his eyes said. My eyes answered: ‘That’s right.’ He: ‘But you can see that’s not going to work right now.’ What, Armanda? Oh. What then? That his half-closed eyes actually flashed, from the bottom of his heart: ‘You’re the only desirable woman in the world, and I’m not going to change my opinion for the rest of my life, even if they put me on the rack?’ Also good. So, in brief, I made the well-known bridge over him. In the spell of some secret, guilty delight, I began to pleasure him in the most exquisite way, using the muscles inside me. Oh God, that was love! If I shut my eyes, all I saw was flashes of light, and if I opened them again I saw him lying there keeping hold of himself, and I realized there was no distinction between his pain, his enjoyment, and my bliss. I was shocked by my feelings for him. Sjoerd was a man it was usually very easy to satisfy.”
“You don’t need to tell me! For example, if you put a wonderful dish on the table, cod, slices of potato, rice, dill, and mustard, he would look at you with a surprised look that said ‘How did you guess what I’ve been wanting all day?’”
“But this time, I don’t know, he wanted some absolutely special effort from me, and believe me, I gave him that pleasure. Movements can take seconds, then minutes to build toward something that you know is coming with absolute certainty. The question, in which you want to the best of your capacity to retain the upper hand, is quite simple: when? When my husband and yours reached that point on this particular day, I was glad that our bedroom was up on the top floor of the house, in the soundproof attic; the roof didn’t touch the neighbors’, because they were hipped roofs and each sloped up into a cone.”
“How old are you now?”
“Me? Not that old, I think. Don’t ask me to tell you exactly. You know, in some people, the decline sets in quite early. Years ago, I was walking down the street and I looked at my feet. I saw them quite clearly, one little boot in front of the other, making their way along a pavement of rectangular flagstones, yet I had absolutely no awareness that I was going anywhere. That’s it, I thought, I have no sense of speed anymore, the needle’s on zero, the world is going backward exactly as fast as I’m trying to go forward. That evening I called my children and asked them to tell me straight when they began to notice I was in the process of going senile. They promised, because what I was saying, implicitly, was that when that happened, I would take my own measures.”
“But they didn’t.”
“Of course not. Telling you straight is only okay when there’s no reason yet to have to do it. Otherwise it would be so heartless, wouldn’t it, and so hateful? Looking a little confused now and then, forgetting a name here and there, it happens to everybody. But start laughing to yourself when you’re alone and refusing to explain why, pretend you’re hard of hearing, lock yourself in, fail to turn off the gas, go wandering through town in your pajamas and dressing gown and be unable to find your way home again, and your children will most certainly stop saying, ‘Mama, we think it’s reached that point.’”
“Oh, what does it matter!”
“That’s what I think too. Nicely locked up in a warm building, and unable to go forward anymore, I look back. I am Armanda, the sister of a woman who was very young when she drove away one morning from a happy home and sadly never came back. Since that time she lives inside me. Do you believe that I soon gave up my favorite licorice and started eating cream fondants? Good, so, when I was twenty-eight and then thirty, I enlarged my sister’s family, which had consisted until then of a husband, a wife, and a little daughter, with an additional daughter and a son. When the marriage collapsed, the world, to my astonishment, continued to follow its set habits. Action, place of action, dialogue, and protagonists remained in the absolute control of my sister. To give you an example, Lidy, take the lovers who surfaced from time to time after my divorce. As regards my sainted sister, and considering that she would have known how much more easygoing life in the Netherlands had become, would they have been accepted by her? The true nature of the sister of my sister remained: her. I maintain that the only person who ever really knew me was Sjoerd, and you, Lidy, have the absolute right to feel offended that he drew a line at our ménage-à-trois. I’m sorry, but I obviously didn’t manage your husband very well.”
“Oh, sweetheart, we’re both only human. I don’t blame you for anything. But why do you keep yawning?”
“Because I prefer to spend the day like a sleepless night. The waking hours of someone who’s constitutionally sleepy are dreamless and dull, like the back side of the moon. Nevertheless my mythic sister still manages to come floating through in the guise of three dead cows or something. Hello, Lidy. How did you get into this sodden chaos again? I know there are mean tricks that can never be put right again.”
“I was just wild about the idea of driving a car again, you don’t forget how so easily.”
“Liar.”
“No-o.”
“Ye-es. Oh, you don’t have to tell me about memory. Just when you’ve lost it is when you recognize how astonishing it is. The memory of someone who at some point allowed themselves to play a joke that went completely wrong works completely differently from the memory of some lucky devil who managed always to be good and behave well. I know how to treasure your magnanimous thoughts. It’s a performance I’ve been giving for a long time now. Oh, how you wanted to go on that weekend expedition, which was supposed to be an invitation to me — except you didn’t. The most important tool of memory is the ability to forget. Remember a phone conversation, even remember part of the actual dialogue, but to keep things simple, forget who proposed what and who in a whisper begged, ‘Oh, please!’ The thing about forgetting that’s piquant is that nine times out of ten it’s not forgetting at all, simply a cut that allows you to insert something. Who in God’s name wants to get lost time back, uncut? I’m old. My eyes are bad, my ears too, I stand absolutely helpless in the flow of time. But at the very last moment a motive I’d forgotten all about reenters the story. It was a kiss, Lidy, no more than that, but on pain of death, no less than that either. A hot, open kiss, a feeling of fire that I’d never encountered before in all my nineteen years, has reappeared in front of my eyes, through the thicket of years, out of the oblivion in which it had been buried. The scene was the wall under the fire escape of the Nausicaä, a dismal, dilapidated student dormitory in the Zwarte Handsteeg, where a party was going on. The time was night. The protagonists were Sjoerd, in an exceptionally resolute role — he must have worked out the whole kiss and had it ready — and your sister, Armanda, who lost the plot just at the moment when her opposite number wanted to get under her skirt, because an angry-looking guy appeared in this garbage-strewn, film-noirish inner courtyard, walking his dog. I wanted to get the kiss back, Lidy, I wanted to have it forever, in my heart….”