Jan Slauerhoff - The Forbidden Kingdom

Especially when one had just crossed an ocean, seeing and smelling nothing but water, sky and rotting wood, and had then been bewildered by a three-day storm and weeks of hunger and wandering. Perhaps among the plants growing round about there were ten deadly poisons. I didn’t pick them.

When I finally got up again, dead leaves and clumps of earth rolled off me, a cloud of insects zoomed into the air and long worms crawled lazily down my legs.

The parasites fled the body that had one foot in the grave but no longer wanted to be a corpse. Between the wall and the trees was a narrow, deep path that could be negotiated only sideways and even then the body had to scrape its way along the wall as if it were blind as a bat. The branches with their thorns and snags tore my ragged clothes to shreds; nettles caused an itching and burning rash on those parts of my skin that had been spared by the mosquitoes.

After this battering I finally found myself in a clearing in the trees that had once been open; dead tree trunks had fallen at right angles across each other, and a dense mesh of thick creepers crossed the space at head height. On the far side an avenue opened up. I struggled through this too. I went down the avenue and stood before a single-storey building, dilapidated but made of stone. It was the hunting lodge where I had had a rendezvous with her. Apart from that I knew nothing. It could be summer or autumn, probably the latter, as I was shivering and was covered in cold dew.

Inside it would be warm and safe from insects, solitary, without people on all sides, without the din I had heard in the island villages, the meaning of which I was ignorant of. The door was closed, but the window at the back was usually open, as it was now. Diana would probably not come here any more. All the better. It had been rebuilt inside, and all the rooms were interconnecting. It was better before, when they all opened onto a courtyard; you know where you are like that, and you can close the door behind you, and escape if you are taken by surprise. No matter: the big rough wooden bed was there; in a jug there was water, green and ill-smelling; it was no good for thirst, but did serve to dab the most inflamed spots.

Trembling hands stripped my body of what tatters were still hanging about me, and a pile of material lay on the ground. Nothing was left of the man who had sailed forth to cover himself in glory, only the bruised, emaciated body. All I had left with which to cover my shame was a deeper, heavier sleep that still lay on me when I woke.

I could not move a muscle. Through the blinds chinks of light, criss-cross and parallel like a trellis, picked out a figure squatting by the wall opposite me staring intently with sparkling green eyes. A smell hung about the room: not incense, but heavier and more pungent…

I lay motionless, for hours, not out of fear of the guard, but for fear of breaching the wall of silence, and tumbling back into an existence I hoped to have done with.

The blind flew open at a sudden gust of wind. In the niche where the statue of St Sebastian had been sat a saint very unlike the emaciated and contorted figures with ascetic limbs and ecstatic, deathly pale, hollow-eyed faces that I had up to now taken for saints. This seemed to be a mockery of my old acquaintances and the situation in which I found myself.

I got up, and saw Sebastian suddenly retreat far into the wall of the room; he seemed to have suffered greatly since I had last seen him, when he had been close to death, which must now lie far behind him. I went up to him: in the past I had had an aversion to him, but now I felt sympathy. He must have felt this, since he responded to me. Yet I was frightened of him, and stretched out my hand, I don’t know whether to greet him or ward him off. It was my own form, seen in a weathered mirror. I turned round; the fat saint was still sitting immovably on a low chair, his fingertips touching but with a belly that flopped over his thighs, and a fat grin around his mouth, as if, making fun of his own saintliness, he had consumed a heavy meal and was already looking forward to the next. The hunting trophies, elk antlers and bear and fox pelts had been removed. A wide painted screen hung down, as far as I could see depicting an old man, bald, with long moustaches, riding on a small horse and holding out a book at the end of a bending stick to two bowing figures on the other side of a purple river: all that could be transmitted to those left behind from his onward-moving life. In the place of the lances and swords hung fans and peacocks’ tails. The ponderous old furniture was replaced by slender and shiny lacquered items, including some whose purpose was incomprehensible to me. One would have to acquire a different bearing and different attitudes to be able to live with them.

Instead of rejoicing that the old world, which had brought nothing but disaster and sadness, had vanished so completely and permanently, I was flooded by an overwhelming melancholy, like the sea flooding a sinking ship, like a second shipwreck.

Only the bed was the same; I could swear to that, and I lay there on it as if on an island, the only survivor of an all-engulfing deluge.

Then, with a shiver, I became aware of my nakedness. I saw clothes lying in front of the bed, hauled them ashore and put them on. They hung about me in wide folds. It was a uniform; the decorations that I had hoped to win before my departure had been attached to the sleeves and shoulders. Was this a mockery? The rough lining chafed my hurt and irritated skin: this robe humiliated me more than anything I could remember; I threw it off in a fury. Rather than wear this I would stay naked all my life. All my life, would that be so much longer? But there was more lying in front of the bed — food. I devoured it. I grabbed for the jug, thinking there might be a few dregs at the bottom, and found myself drinking fresh water.

On the ground there was another item of clothing, a long, wide garment. I put it on and found it tolerable, though I became almost a stranger to myself. Still I kept it on, but lowered myself out of the window to come to myself again in the wood. The plant world at least had not become totally alien.

But now I was beset by heavy unknown perfumes, and kept stumbling over treacherous roots, impeded by the long garment. I wanted to rest, hidden among the trees, but now it was no longer autumn, and it was hot; I sought the shade, but the leaves were smoky hot, the earth seemed to be heated from within and was alive, with armies of ants advancing from all sides, big red ants that bit, while spiders lowered themselves from the branches and the buzzing of the mosquitoes resumed. I fled, running to where there was a clearing, and was suddenly back in front of the gate, yanked at the bars in order to escape hellish torments of this unbearable paradise, though outside I could see nothing but the sea, that other hell. This time the gate did not budge. Again I turned and went into an avenue, but my legs gave way and I stopped as if turned into a tree trunk.

At the end of the avenue, lit beneath the foliage by a shaft of light, stood Diana, like a Madonna in a green niche.

I stalked her like a panther in the wild. She would no longer escape me now, evaporate into a cloud or fade into the wood.

She did not move a muscle; she seemed to be bending intently over something — a flower or a book, what did it matter?

One more leap: she turned round, I stumbled backwards just as fast. It was Diana, but with the slanted eyes of a Chinese woman.

PILAR HAD HAD NO MORE SLEEP since her father had left and her door was guarded. She herself watched out for the attack that was bound to come. The man supposed to prevent her flight was asleep, or if not, he was keeping his eyes shut. Gold is a good sedative too. It took a long time, but Pilar also knew a herb that banished sleep. Yet it came as a relief when she finally saw the halberdier leave and a little later saw an ungainly body clambering into the foliage of the tree. She now had a reason to leave her father’s house.