Jan Slauerhoff: The Forbidden Kingdom

I did not like Portugal, though it was the land of my birth. The country is monotonous and melancholy, and so is life there. There is no flourish or panache as in Italy and France, and my fatherland is inferior in everything save navigation. But it was still painful to see how this uncouth monarch with his coarse mind and misshapen body sucked it dry and drove it to its downfall, had everything in his power, used everything for his own profit: agriculture, industry, navigation. In gluttony and greed he was matched only by prelates and pirates.

In the evening I drank with the pages on guard, and then I went to my room. I felt light-hearted and thought only of the hunt. Diana was to go too. I would give her a sign and preceded by a fleeing deer she would stray down to where I was waiting. Then, afterwards…

The light shone through a chink in the window, through a bottle of wine, onto the black table, across my hands lying there, separately, as if they alone knew what was going to happen with the rest of this life. The change had begun. Soon the luxurious court robes would be exchanged for cumbersome armour. These hands would change, I would have to forget, unlearn many things: how to turn the head of a lady of the court with just looks, how to show one’s rival one’s contempt, put him in the shade and with a well-chosen last word cause him to disappear for days from court circles. Forget Portugal, the little country whose border one can reach in three days. And I knew nothing of the Eastern Hemisphere that awaited me; I as yet knew nothing except vague tales and the pungent smell of spices. Would it be as wonderful as I thought? I remembered how I pictured Lisbon, as a city of golden palaces, sunny feast days and silver nights. It’s certainly a beautiful city, no less, but certainly no more.

It grew lighter and became gloomier again. In the light of morning a smile from Diana struck me as more desirable than a voyage around the world. But it was too late. I had played the dangerous game of two great vital interests, betting blindly, playing boldly, and too late I realized that I was losing what I should have fought desperately for and winning what was less close to my heart. Suddenly all my thoughts again turned to the hunt. I would pursue her like a deer, until she could flee no more, until she begged for mercy. I already knew where it would be: at the spring where the drinking animals break the reed stalks and where people do not venture, fearful of water spirits that raise their mist-shrouded arms and pull intruders down into the depths till they drown. And I would be with her when she feared the worst.

* An intricate verse form at which the young Camões excelled, with seven-line stanzas of between five and seven syllables, and an abbaacc rhyme scheme.

BUT WHEN CAMÕES SAW DIANA in the hunting party, seated unattainably on horseback, he suddenly knew that she was not the game that he could hunt, but that he would be the fugitive, even though he fled to the other end of the world. Cautiously he edged his horse closer to hers and asked her if she would stray away from the company and come to the spring of fairies and ghosts. She agreed. For a long time he sat waiting on a fallen tree trunk, half in the lake, scooping up water with his hat. Finally the noise of breaking branches, the deer escaped from the trees and shortly afterward Diana rode her horse to where he sat; she placed her foot in his folded hands and descended to him.

In the evening she returned to the hunt alone, she did not talk of a sprained ankle or a misleading path and no one asked her. She never alluded to this day in a letter, and it never became a page in the chronicles, as did many days on which something less important happened, when a city was burnt to the ground or a battle was won. No confessor later betrayed it in his memoirs. The walls of the convent to which she consigned her body, abandoned by Camões and denied to the Infante, do not hold the echo which only centuries later returns the words whispered to their stones.

After that Camões abandoned love songs, forcing himself to obey the strict measures of the crude poem that transformed plundering expeditions into feats of heroism. Only in the depths of misery, while seated on a scorched rock by the Red Sea, did he lament the fact that he had lost, and had wilfully turned his back on happiness. — Perhaps Os Lusíadas was only written in order to throw up a word here and there among the innumerable stanzas, just as the long wide waves throw up a few planks from which a shipwrecked mariner later builds a house on distant coasts. But no one has ever collected those words: Os Lusíadas has gone on existing like the convent, as a remnant of fame; behind the joints, through the cracks and splits one does not glimpse the sweet and painful life walled up in it.

PATIENT AS A DEAD MAN, I sat waiting on the deck of the boat that was to take me upstream. It was a gloomy day. The myriad colours of Lisbon were blotted out by a mist found only extremely rarely round the mouth of the Tagus. It was a slow business. Time after time a few people or a few barrels would cross the gangplank — but suddenly a wide stretch of water was flowing between the river and the shore. I saw a horseman ride off; I knew his face: a courier whose duty it was to report that I had safely left. But who was to prevent me from jumping in the water and regaining the shore in a few strokes! I did not do it, though it would have been easy. Little did I know that I was later to make that leap to swim across a distance a thousand times greater, no longer to save my soul, but my skin, and a piece of paper.

When I looked up again the city was a distant panorama; only the Belem watchtower protruded in front of and above the houses. Again I drifted off: the days after the hunt were a basalt coast that I swam along, and tried to round in order to discover where my life had fractured, but I could not reach the site of the break.

Above my head sails were being raised. I heard iron scraping over wood, ropes creaking, canvas flapping. And then:

“Art thou heavy laden beneath thy sorrow, my son? Come unto me all ye whose hearts are weighed down. That was said for all and also for you. God has sent me, relieve your mind of its burden.”

I remained sitting there and tried to guess the face from the voice. It was unctuous and rotund, with a drawling intonation. I expected wrinkles, a red nose and watery eyes and my rancour was not abated when I saw I was mistaken. He was a young Dominican with a youthful, blushing face and small, short-sighted eyes behind spectacles: one of those herd animals that are lured by the security of one black habit a year and good food three times a day, filling the seminaries and besides the meals chewing over a few dogmas, and later always ready to spew them out over anyone who comes within range and appears to be their inferior in faith.

I did not move. Taking this to be humility, he continued, raising his voice:

“God has sent me!” And coming closer to me, “Desist from your errors before it is too late!”

I smelt the odour of sweat in my nose and this made me get up and reply:

“It’s no accident that an order should have been established for associating with the nobility, whose members may be pure in heart but are definitely pure in body and have well-manicured hands. Are you one of them? How long is it since you took a bath?”

That seemed to do the trick. He shrank back, muttered something about the Evil One and about the body that must be neglected, and crossed himself repeatedly. That afternoon I saw him in animated conversation with a couple of merchants; all day long I saw him walking up and down, now with one person, now with another. I was convinced he was setting them against me, but it left me cold. I had a cabin to myself, but at night still slept in a boat on the aft deck. I paid no attention to the other passengers; yet it didn’t escape me that some of them cast venomous glances in my direction. At night I saw the stars, in daytime the barren banks passing by. On the second night too I was in my favourite spot: the boat hanging under the poop deck; I was woken by steps pacing up and down and by a conversation, alternating with long silences. To my astonishment I heard the dominant voice in this conversation several times mention the King’s name with bitterness, which was answered with grunts of agreement by the other.