The Following Story by Cees Nooteboom

Author:Cees Nooteboom [Nooteboom, Cees]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-11-29T00:00:00+00:00

This is, I believe, it: not the cruel anguish of physical death but the incomparable pangs of the mysterious manoeuvre needed to pass from one state of being to another.

Easy, you know, does it, son.

VLADIMIR NABOKOV, Transparent Things

2

Anyone who is used to keeping a class of thirty pupils under control has learned to be quick-sighted. A boy, two old men, two men of my own age. The woman standing somewhat aloof like a figurehead was harder to place, perhaps that first impression was the best: a figurehead. She beckoned the dinghy that was to take us to the ship lying at anchor in mid-stream. It was still early. There was a pale mist, the ship was a blurred, dark mass. What struck me most was the intensity of the boy’s expression, eyes like gun-barrels. I recognized the kind, you see them on the meseta, the high Spanish plain. The kind that can see far into the distance in the white light of the sun. There was no conversation as yet. We knew at once that we belonged together. My dreams have always borne a disturbing resemblance to life, as if even in my sleep I could not come up with something new, but now it was the other way round, now at last my life resembled a dream. Dreams are closed systems, in which everything fits to perfection.

I looked at the absurd statue of Christ high on the south bank, arms outstretched, ready to jump. “Ready to jump,” that was what she had said. Seeing the statue again I suddenly remembered what we had talked about, that evening beside the water. She had wanted to explain all sorts of things about the brain, cells, impulses, cerebellum, cortex, the whole butcher’s shop which reputedly monitors and controls everything we do, and I had told her that I loathed phrases like “grey matter”, that cells reminded me of prisons, and that I had so often fed Bat one of those little blood-veined puddings. In short, I had made it clear that it was by no means essential for my thought process to know precisely which recesses of that spongy organ were being set to work. She had retorted that I was worse than medieval man, that Vesalius’ lancet had already liberated the spiritually indigent such as myself from the prison of their bodies, to which I had of course said that all her razor-sharp blades and laser beams had never been able to fathom the hidden kingdom of memory, and that to me Mnemosyne was infinitely more real than the notion that all my memories, including those which I would eventually have of her, were potted up in a piggy-bank made of a grey, beige or cream-coloured, lobed and altogether rather slimy substance, and then she had kissed me and I had muttered something to those urgent, searching, yearning lips, but she had simply silenced my babbling mouth with hers, and we had sat there until dawn’s rosy fingers touched the Christ figure on the far side of the river.

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