Quinten watched him and asked: "Shall I go?"
Onno shook his head. "Things are as they are," he said softly. "Quinten .. . how are you? You look well. You've grown two heads taller."
"I suppose I have, yes."
"How long have you been in Rome?"
"Since yesterday afternoon."
"Are you here with the whole class? I came here for the first time when I was in school."
"I'm not in school anymore."
Onno, who had given up so much more, realized that he was in no position to comment; the very fact that he had not known about this deprived him of his right to speak. What's more, he heard a sort of decisiveness in Quinten's voice that dismissed all criticism in advance. He wanted to ask about Ada, but perhaps she was no longer alive.
"I still can't believe that we're suddenly sitting here, Quinten."
"Perhaps we aren't."
A smile crossed Onno's face. "Perhaps we're dreaming. Both having the same dream." He looked at him shyly. He had to inquire about Ada. "How's Mama?"
"The same, as far as I know. I haven't seen her." He didn't want to talk about his mother; he also suddenly felt irritated that his father had to ask about her. She might have been dead. Or had she died in the meantime perhaps? His granny still did not know where she could reach him. He'd want to know in a moment how Max was doing, and then he would have to tell him what had happened. To give the conversation a different turn, he asked, "Why are you using a walking stick?"
Onno put the stick on his lap and looked at it. It was a crudely trimmed, gnarled branch, with its unprotected tip transformed into a weathered brush; the curved handle had been artistically shaped into a serpent's head.
"Nice, isn't it? Found it in a secondhand shop." Slowly he turned to face Quinten and said, "I had a slight stroke, a brain hemorrhage eighteen months ago." And then he saw that Quinten was alarmed. "Don't worry, it's over now. But it happened very deep, in a dangerous place, in the thalamus, as it's called. Less than an inch farther forward, and I would have been in a wheelchair—the neurologist said I should consider myself lucky. Do you know that feeling? When you fall under a tram and lose your leg, you should be happy that you didn't lose both legs. Whenever something serious happens, you're supposed to count yourself lucky and be happy."
"Did it hurt a lot?"
"Not at all. In real life things are always different than you've imagined them. Shall I tell you about it?"
Quinten gave a slight shrug of the shoulders. He didn't really want to know, but he wanted to put off the question about Max for as long as possible.
One cold winter's day, said Onno, he was walking down the street not far from here. Suddenly he felt something hanging over his head. It was as if he were not completely there. His left hand began tingling, and a moment later his left foot. He felt as if he had a couple of stones in his shoe, but a minute later his whole left shoe was full of stones and all those stones together formed his left foot. After another minute he realized that something was seriously wrong. His whole left leg, his left side, and the left-hand half of his face had gone numb. Because it had all been on the left, he thought of his heart, but he had no pain in his chest, though he did have a little in his head, though not even enough to require an aspirin. Now and then he had to stop.
When he felt his pulse, his heart was racing so fast that he couldn't count. He tried to take off his left glove, but he never wore gloves; he realized that he was busy pulling his fingers. He tried to tell from the faces of the people who came toward him whether there was anything strange to be seen about him; but he didn't see anything special. And yet he knew they were now in a different world from him. He sat down on the edge of the pavement and a woman asked if she should call for an ambulance. He said it wasn't necessary, but she did anyway; a little later he was driven to the hospital with wailing sirens. There they pushed him into a kind of gigantic, turning oven, for taking brain scans. Three days later he was back home.
"All that happened was that I wasn't allowed to smoke or drink anymore. Well, three glasses of wine a day, but that makes you more or less a teetotaler. The left-hand side of my body is still a little numb, and I'm almost always giddy when I walk. Perhaps it will pass eventually; but as you get older, things usually don't pass. That's why I use a walking stick now. I can do without it, but I feel safer with one."
"Why did you suddenly have that hemorrhage?"
"I've a hunch about that. Do you remember I used to work on deciphering archaic script? I once published a theory about Etruscan, for which I received an honorary doctorate."
"Yes, Auntie Dol said the other day that you told her to send it back."
"Dol . .." repeated Onno, and was silent for a moment. "How's Dol?"
"They live on Menorca now."
Onno looked in a melancholy way through the space, which was filling with tourists.
"You probably also know that after that Etruscan thing I turned my attention to the Phaistos disc, but I couldn't crack it. I went into politics to have a private excuse for not being able to work on it anymore. But things didn't work out in politics either, and when Auntie Helga died I didn't know what to do anymore. I wrote to you all about that. I wanted to go away for good—but where? Then I thought: I'm back where I started. Perhaps I won't want to do anything anymore, but you never know for sure. Nothing is final in life, apart from death—as you can see yet again now. So I thought: if ever I want to do anything else, then I must continue where I left off, with that disc. The script had still not been deciphered. Actually, my old notes were the only thing I took with me from Amsterdam, although I could scarcely understand them any longer. And since I had to go somewhere, that settled my destination. Rome. You won't find as much material anywhere else. Maybe in London, but it rains most of the time there."
"Of course!" cried Quinten. "I could have thought of that myself! I only thought of Crete."
Onno looked at Quinten. "Did you want to find me?"
"Yes, of course. Do you think that's crazy?"
Onno looked down. Somehow he must have been groggy from the blow all these years, like a boxer hanging on the ropes and being constantly pounded by his opponent, even though the referee with his bow tie occasionally stepped between them. He hadn't really admitted the thought of Quinten to himself. Since Quinten's birth he had told himself that though the boy might be physically the son of himself and Ada, he'd actually been Max and Sophia's son from day one. What a mistake! What a dreadful lie! It was as though from minute to minute more and more crusts were falling off him, as they did off a croute emerging from the oven.
"No, I don't think it's crazy." He looked at him again. "Did you visit Hans Giltay Veth?"
"Of course. But I wasn't any the wiser for that."
Onno was silent for a moment—but then he forced himself to say: "Do you forgive me, Quinten?"
Quinten looked straight at him with his azure eyes. "There's nothing to forgive."
It was as though Onno were sitting opposite his father—as though his son were his superior, and he could raise no objections.
"I was telling you what may have been the reason for my hemorrhage," he continued. "Those linguistic things were lying around in my room and I never looked at them again. But one morning, about eighteen months ago, I went to the market in the square around the corner from my place to get something to eat. I bought a piece of San Pietro, sunfish, I remember exactly; I can remember the fishwife wrapping it in a newspaper with her swollen red hands. I hadn't read a newspaper since I'd left Holland, but as I was unwrapping the fish at home, I suddenly saw my own name—spelled as Qiuts. When you're famous later and in the paper, you'll also notice that: it's as though the letters of your name jump off the page at you. The report was about my former rival Pellegrini, who was a professor here in Rome and had never been convinced by my Etruscan theory. In the past he had even written letters to Uppsala to block my honorary doctorate, as I heard from the vice-chancellor there. And I now read that in
his old age he had been visiting his son's new country house in Tuscany, somewhere near Arezzo, and was walking through the garden when he suddenly fell into a hole in the ground. And what do you think? He'd landed in an Etruscan burial chamber. He had broken his hip, but the first thing he saw inscribed on a stela was a new bilingue—the same text in two languages, in this case Etruscan and Phoenician. From this it emerged that il professore islandese Qiuts had gotten it all wrong in any case. That meant there was virtually nothing of my life left."
"Except for me, that is."
"Yes," said Onno, looking away. "Except for you, of course. But nothing else. And I also knew that no one in the field would take me seriously again if I came up with a solution to the Phaistos disc. So I threw away all my notes, hundreds of pages, the work of years. What shocked me most perhaps was a remark of Pellegrini's. When the journalist asked him how on earth he had contrived to fall into that chamber of all chambers, the old villain said, 'A question of talent.' He was right. I had no talent. The following day there was that incident in my bedroom."
"In your bedroom? You just said it happened in the street."
"That's what thalamus means: 'bedroom,' 'bed,' 'marriage bed.' " Quinten looked at the dazzling egg: it had left the fresco, sunk slightly, and moved right, toward a chapel with a terracotta-colored Annunciation. The building had become crowded, but it was still just as quiet, as though the sound of the voices was being sucked like smoke through the opening at the top of the cupola.
Quinten sighed deeply. His father had been spared few things, and much should be forgiven him. Was that the same with everyone? Was that how life was? If everything finally came to nothing, what was the point of it? So was something like that waiting for him? The thought seemed ridiculous to him. Of course not! He didn't know what he was going to do, but once he had made a decision, then he would see it through to the end—nothing and no one would stop him: that was absolutely one hundred percent certain.
"Aren't you frightened that it'll happen again?"
"A stroke?" Onno shrugged his shoulders. "If it happens it happens. I'm not so worried about my body—I've always felt as if it belonged to someone else. A kind of pet." He glanced upward, at the disc of light through which Edgar had disappeared.
"And what do you do all day long?"
"Nothing. Sleep. Make notes. Think a bit. But everything I think is just as awful." He looked at Quinten. "I don't exist anymore, Quinten. I once read a story about a woman without a shadow, but I'm a shadow without a man."
That was it. Quinten could scarcely imagine it was the same man sitting there who in the past, in answer to the same question, would have shaken his index finger above his head like a prophet and cried, "I'm devoting myself to the spirit: the call of the abyss!" He wanted to ask him about the raven, which had just flown off through that blue pupil, but at the same moment Onno too opened his mouth. Quinten restrained himself and knew what was coming next.
"Is Max in Rome too?"
Quinten did not answer, but looked straight at him.
"Why aren't you saying anything?"
With a shiver, Quinten saw that Max's death was now getting through to his father even without words, like water trickling through rock.
"When?" Onno stammered finally.
"A few months ago."
"How?"
"Hit by a meteorite."
Without saying anything, Onno stared through the whispering space. Was it perhaps this news, the possibility of this news, from which he had fled four years ago, unable to bear that too? But now it sank in like a meal that he had eaten—perhaps because he had regained Quinten in place of Max? After a minute he took a deep breath and said: "Him too."
"What do you mean 'Him too'?"
"Lack of talent."
That evening in the youth hostel, unable to get to sleep, Quinten kept seeing a drawing from a book that he had once been given by Max for his birthday: one moment it looked like the outline of a vase, the next like the profiles of two faces looking at each other: space and matter were constantly changing places, matter became space, space matter. When he finally fell asleep, his father's face had disappeared, and his own too—only what was between them remained: that vase, filled with liquid air, blue water close to absolute zero . . .
54
The Stones of Rome
The following morning Quinten went to the address that Onno had given him. The Via del Pellegrino was a tall, narrow, winding street that led into the Campo dei Fiori, a large square where there was a market. In the corner near a cafe there was a large heap of rubbish, but it wasn't a slum; there were orange and red plastered housefronts, lots of shops with secondhand furniture alternating with displays of plastic kitchen equipment, a piano repair workshop, a small grocer's.
Opposite a shop selling clocks there was a covered passage, hung with mirrors in gold frames; flanked by two ancient weatherbeaten columns, the greater part of which must be in the ground, the gateway led to an intimate courtyard, with plants in large pots and parked scooters and motorbikes around it. Under an array of drying laundry, a carpenter was at work; from the open windows came the sound of voices and music. Quinten took it all in, wide-eyed. So this was the point on the globe that he had been looking for all those years and which had been here all the time. Now that he was here, he found it incomprehensible that he had not known before that here was where he should have gone.
Via the outside staircase that his father had described to him he reached a very drafty stairwell, filled with the noise of playing children, constantly interrupted by mothers calling out "Paolo!" or "Giorgio!" at intervals. On the top floor the door to his father's room was half open. He stood shyly on the threshold.
"Dad?"
"Entrez!"
Onno was leaning forward at a sink brushing his teeth, his torso bare. His long hair was loose, his beard disheveled: it was now even more obvious how much weight he had put on.
"Good morning," he said into the small shaving mirror, with white tooth paste foam on his lips. "I'd like to say make yourself comfortable, but you'll find that a problem here."
The disorder came as no surprise to Quinten. The bed also served as a wardrobe; undefined rubbish bulged out of cardboard boxes; the chaos around a gas ring in the corner of the room scarcely suggested a kitchen. Nowhere was there a telephone or a radio, let alone a television. He glanced out the attic window above the desk. A rippling sea of rust-brown tiles, television aerials, church towers silhouetted against the deep blue sky. In the distance he could just see the gigantic angel on the top of the Castel Sant'Angelo, on the other side of the Tiber. The windowsill was covered in a thick layer of bird droppings.
"What a mess it is in here. Shall I tidy up?"
"There's no point. But go ahead and throw everything away."
They said no more about Max. While Onno told him about Edgar, who had kept him company in recent weeks, Quinten cleared the table, filled two waste-disposal bags with rubbish, and gathered up the dirty clothes that were lying everywhere.
"Why did you call him Edgar?"
"After Edgar Allan Poe, of course. He wrote a famous poem called 'The Raven.' " He stood up, looked in the round mirror that hung on a nail against the wall, and said: " 'Other friends have flown before—on the morrow he will leave me as my Hopes have flown before.' Then the bird said, 'Nevermore.' But he did leave me and I've got a feeling that he won't be back. Perhaps he was frightened by the Pantheon. But I've already come to terms with it, because I have you back in his place." And in exchange for Max, he thought, but he kept that to himself.
Each felt the other's uncertainty about the new situation, but neither could find words to talk about it. They took the washing to the laundrette, a couple of houses along, and sat down on the cafe terrace on the corner. In the middle of the crowded, rectangular square stood a somber statue of a monk with his cowl covering his head.
"Who's that?" asked Quinten.
"Giordiano Bruno."
Quint
en nodded. "Who made the universe infinite."
"Did Max tell you that?"
"No, Mr. Verloren van Themaat."
"And you remembered that."
"Yes, why not? I hardly ever forget anything."
Onno looked at the statue for a while, lost in thought.
"That's the spot where they burned him as a heretic." He pointed with his stick at the crowd between the stalls. "Do you know what all that is? All that is also what it is not."
"I don't understand."
"The world will now always also be the Max-less world."
Quinten knew that Max had meant more to his father than to him, that long ago there had been a friendship between them of a kind that he had never had or would ever have with anyone. He looked at his father out of the corner of his eye. His head had sunk slightly forward; there was something elusive about the closeness of the hairy face with the sunglasses, as if at the same time it were too far away to reach.
The waiter came out of the cafe and greeted Onno like an old acquaintance, calling him "Signor Enrico." As he wiped the tabletop with a damp cloth, he glanced at Quinten with slightly raised eyebrows.
"This is my son, Mauro," said Onno in Italian. "Quintilio."
Mauro shook hands with him, without the ironic expression disappearing from his face. It was clear that he only half believed it; the old eccentric had obviously taken up with a rent boy, on the Via Appia—but he didn't begrudge him that.
"Everyone knows me here as Mr. Enrico," said Onno, when Mauro had gone inside. "Enrico Delius," with a diffident note in his voice. "They think I'm an Austrian from the Tyrol."