Jan Slauerhoff - The Forbidden Kingdom

The moments of rest and pleasure were the long nights’ sleep ashore, from early in the morning till late in the evening, and a visit to a brothel about once every three months.

No, this was not the good life.

But is that of a poor farmer in an Irish village, between the Atlantic on one side and the boggy meadows of the Emerald Isle on the other, any better?

In that lonely village my family and two others in turn formed a separate community, and within it I was alone. What had I, half grown, in common with my parents, frugal with words and miserly with kisses, with my brother, a born farm labourer, or my sisters, one of whom became pregnant by one of the other clan at the age of sixteen and no longer associated with us, the other dry and skinny, a milkmaid who did not look like a woman with her man’s gait and massive, raw red hands? Perhaps I would have been accepted by the others on my return from thirty years at sea and not despised as a member of the black jellyfish. Yes, that’s what they called my family and the two others. All of us had black hair and eyes, and were short and thick-set.

We weren’t Irish. We were the last scions of the accursed Celtic race that had lived here before the birth of Christ, said the parson. No, descendants of shipwrecked mariners from the Armada, said the schoolmaster, that is, cowards who had not fought, but had fled right around Scotland, constantly sailing the great galleons ahead of the fierce English vessels that were hunting them down.

So our forefathers had eaten the bread of charity there on that barren coast and had been the slaves of those who were themselves the vassals of the powerful distant English landlords. Some had nevertheless married the coast-dwellers’ least eligible womenfolk, but the children had looked like them and had been just as despised and subjected, short, black-haired and timid, and so it had remained.

With ten other survivors I had been put ashore in M…e…, the nearest harbour. I received no compensation for my lost belongings, and I had nothing but the emergency money sewn into my shirt, which wasn’t much. The din of the port, which did not stop even at night, threw me into a torment of insomnia, and I knew of a house in one of the narrow alleys that one could enter unseen and let oneself be transported by the smoke, but I felt that once there I would no longer be able to return to life, and so I called on my last reserves of strength.

One afternoon I left the town and stayed in a village three hours farther on, and spent the night there, ravaged by all the demons inside me (there were no ghosts in the room), and the next day was unable to continue. I was ill and confused and was running a high fever. Fortunately the good hotel-keepers kept me and over several weeks I came to myself after awakening from my clouded state.

I could not think of signing up for a ship, and anyway I had conceived an intense dislike of the profession. I had no aim to strive for.

I did not consider going back to Glencoe. I did not keep up a correspondence, like many sailors do who want to fool themselves when they arrive in a faraway foreign harbour with a piece of paper sent from a place where they were once at home, a piece of paper containing the invariable words written without heart or attention, as ridiculous formulae of a ceremony lacking all basis in reality.

The Irish on board hated the English, but I could not even draw closer to them in their hatred, since I wasn’t a real Irishman. But I couldn’t get on with the English either; I was even less of a real Englishman. So I was left alone and had only the occasional almost wordless friendships with the inhabitants of the Baltic coast and fjord fishermen who often find their way into tramp shipping when the catch is poor or their own poor country cannot fit out enough ships.

Yes, if the Trafalgar hadn’t run aground, if that cliff had not been on its slightly off-course route (the steering was bad and careless on that ship, one of the wettest I have ever known), things would have gone on like that until my old age. I would have muddled along, signalled along, listened along, until I had gone deaf, which in this business usually happens before you reach fifty.

The shipwreck had disrupted my life at this low, easy level. The impact could have helped me rise above it, and start a life of my own on shore after all. But I went under; the languor of my race, aggravated over the years, was dragging me down to the lowest point. I was only interested to know where that point was. And I started thinking about the how and the why and the whence. That is dangerous work for a person not firmly anchored by family ties; that is putting to sea without charts and taking soundings off an unknown coast.

I could live at this cheap hotel for a few months from my emergency funds if I spent nothing else. I did so and waited to see what would happen if I did nothing else. I stayed in that hotel, in that room for a long time. It had one great attraction for my body, which for years had been accustomed to heat: an open fire. When the sun set, I piled on the logs, set them alight and sat at it, in the attitude of devotion adopted by a sun-worshipper turned fire-worshipper. First I automatically dozed off. The evenings grew long and I tried all kinds of liqueurs. Were my efforts crowned with success? I will pass over that in silence, in my case not the “only true greatness”, but the admission of a humiliating defeat.

I cannot remember the date of my deepest decadence, but it must have been the year of the great earthquake that largely destroyed Lisbon. I remember that because it gave me the only feeling of joy I knew at that time. It was like the wreaking of a vengeance that had been waiting for centuries. It may seem odd and yet that was how it was. Every new report on the many victims and ever-mounting destruction gave me a thrill. When it was too dark to read, I picked up the newspaper and stroked the columns where the earthquake was reported, until my fingers became sticky with printer’s ink. Then I slung the paper into the fire and, as it blazed, I saw houses curl up, towers topple, people scorched. Then there was a crackle and it was over.

I slowly began to recover. From the only window I saw the sun languishing, the last brown leaves withering on the protruding branches of the beeches that moaned in my sleep at night. During the day I sometimes walked along the curve of the bay in the hope that the sun would once more shine fiercely over the foothills, but I never saw it again. I had to content myself with the moon, which in the evening would sometimes accidentally slide out from among the clouds; then I would sit at the fire again and fall asleep, wake with a shudder in the night, stare at the glowing embers, too tired to undress, and would roll onto my mattress and go back to sleep.

One day a woman I had known in the past came to see me there. I didn’t know how she had managed to find me and I never asked. She simply stayed. Sometimes I possessed her, with my eyes squeezed shut, on the floor or the window seat, just as it happened, but I didn’t lose a minute’s sleep over her. It had become too raw to go out. I now constantly read a book on the history of the three empires, which had the advantage that you never finished it, since by the end you had forgotten the beginning. The woman — strangely! — did not feel I was living in the underworld; she was quite content like this. I sometimes told her that she might just as well go, but she stayed.

One afternoon there was less wind. I walked alone down the road to the big port city that — how long ago was it? — I had fled. Then I felt that the sickness that had taken hold of me and rendered me powerless as long as I was on shore had left me, but strangely I felt not relieved, but rather very lonely, as if a trusted friend had gone for ever without saying goodbye. I would never see him again in this world. Was that not a cause for happiness? But it was as if the wind were rustling through the gaunt palms which do not really belong at this latitude, just as I do not, and were saying: “Gone away, gone away…” I leant against a trunk for a long time and came back home late at night. Much later, one afternoon when she and the weather almost matched each other in colour: her dull blond hair had the hue of the fading wood, her eyes that of the sky beyond, her voice did not rise above the pouring rain — I crept away. The light was fading and her presence in the room was no more than that of a ghost. Perhaps mine was too, and she did not notice my leaving, but I felt that my strength was now sufficient to reach the port city.