Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

Wings flapping, Edgar jumped onto his shoulder.

"Cras. Cras."

On May 11, 1985, as a pope was flying to the Netherlands for the first time, beneath him on the ground Quinten was traveling south by train. Under the ground, actually, through Alpine tunnels, beyond which Italy suddenly unfolded: blue and green and descending, like at Groot Rechteren when he emerged from of the chilly cellar into the warm sun on the forecourt. Sophia had taken him to the station, hugged him with a stony face, but as soon as he had said goodbye she had disappeared from his thoughts. On the way he had not read or slept, but simply looked out the window the whole time, at all those countless towns and villages in Germany and Switzerland where his father might be.

However, while he was looking for his connection in Milan in the throng on the platforms, even that had receded and gradually an exciting feeling of freedom took possession of him, which became more and more intense when near Mestre he traveled out to sea along a railway embankment and saw Venice on the water in the distance; a vague blue phantom, as though on the horizon the sky had been lifted up a little and a glimpse of another world came through the crack. Was it a mirage? Was that where the Citadel was?

Emerging from the station with his blue-gray nylon backpack, he stopped. On the wide stairs of the terrace and on the square in front of the station hundreds of young people were sitting in the sun. On the other side was a white church. Between, it looked as though the water of the Grand Canal was being stirred by giant, invisible white bird's feathers: everything was moving, it was as though the light itself were undulating and waving and glittering in the sun — gondolas, vaporetti, water taxis, swaying and crying everywhere, everything foaming like a breaking wave in the surf. At the same time he had the impression that when he stood there, more eyes were focused on him than had ever happened at home. He went to a simple hotel nearby, in the out-of-the-way working-class district of Cannaregio, where few tourists went. On the arch above the entrance were Hebrew letters, most of which could no longer be deciphered. His window gave onto a small courtyard with flues and flaking plaster. The bed took up virtually the whole room, and the shower was in the corridor, but he didn't need any more room: he had the city for that.

After a few days Holland was so far away that it was if he had never been there. His mother's body in her white bed, Max's empty grave, his vanished father — none of that seemed to be his life anymore. He didn't get involved with anyone; he communed with things the whole day long. He wandered from morning till night through the maze of alleys, canals, bridges, dark doorways, silent squares; ate some tortellini here, a plate of spaghetti there; went into and out of churches and museums and allowed himself to get lost. If it took too long, he glanced at the little compass around his neck, with the plan of Venice in his head: those two relaxed intertwined hands, divided by the Grand Canal.

That labyrinthine quality sometimes reminded him of his dream, as did the absence of trees and plants and wheels. Behind the Piazza San Marco he also discovered a church, San Moisè, the black facade of which was covered from top to bottom with a baroque eczema of statues and ornaments; when he stood close to it and threw his head back, it might be a fragment of the Citadel. The high altar was a wild monument, entitled St. Moses Receiving the Tablets of the Law on Mount Sinai.

But apart from that his Citadel, where he was still the only person, was more the reverse of Venice. Not only because of the stream of people, which always moved along the same ant paths, and which he was soon able to avoid, but because it wasn't an interior without an exterior but more an exterior as an interior. Each time he emerged via a doorway or a narrow street into St. Mark's Square, it was like a bang on a drum. That gigantic marble-coated banqueting hall, with the sky as the ceiling as painted by Tiepolo with a real blue sky and feathery cloud! All that lightness and floating, whether it was Byzantine, Gothic, or Renaissance, the filigree arabesques of the basilica, the four horses that pulled it through the centuries, with the pink, newly built Doge's palace with its gallery of keys, with the teeth as balustrades, the shafts as pillars, the Gothic perforated eyes seem to carry the actual weight of the building — to think that such a thing could exist! At the end of the piazzetta, like a gateway to the great outside, the wide world, with the two colossal pillars of red and white granite, their capitals topped with the winged lion and a patron saint seated on a crocodile, between which for centuries death sentences had been carried out. Even criminals were allowed to die in beauty here: the last thing they had seen was the living water of the lagoon — and the church on the small island on the other side: Palladio's San Giorgio Maggiore.

So there it finally was — no longer in Mr. Themaat's books, but in the sun and the Adriatic sea wind. The white marble facade with the two superimposed temple fronts, as harmonious as a fugue: behind it the bare redbrick nave, with the gray cupola at the intersection. Of course he also took the vaporetto to see everything at close quarters and from inside, sailing across the spot where for centuries the Doge had thrown a ring into the water annually, to seal his marriage with the sea.

How could he be so fascinated by Venice when the city had so little to do with his Citadel? All things considered, Palladio's severe symmetries were completely out of place here too, because in Venice everything was precisely asymmetrical. The piazza wasn't an oblong but a trapezoid, the basilica was not on the axis; the windows of the Doge's palace did not reflect each other. Was he on the track of a law? Might it be that beauty was geometrically and musically calculable but that, in turn, perfection somehow diverged from it? Just as a straight line drawn with a ruler was always somehow less than a straight line when Picasso drew it without a ruler? Was there a difference between a dead and a living line? Should he perhaps start studying art history? But you couldn't study without your high school exams; besides, art didn't interest him at all for its own sake, but because of what was behind it.

On Ascension Day he took an excursion to the mainland, to Vicenza. With a mainly English group he visited the Teatro Olimpico, with its fairytale interior without an exterior, and all those other churches and palaces that he knew so well from the library at Groot Rechteren, under the P of Palladio. They were no longer framed by the silent white of the page, but turned out to be standing next to other buildings, in certain streets, full of the din of cars and scooters, where in the squares old gentlemen stood and talked indignantly to each other, and then walked on arm in arm, where fruit sellers cried and young pizza bakers tossed their spinning circles of dough in the air, to allow the laws of nature to do their work in the spirit of Galileo and Newton.

On the way back, the bus stopped at two other Palladian villas. First, just outside Vicenza, the Villa Rotonda: a vision in stone on top of a green hill, with its round central building another descendant of the Roman Pantheon, but now equipped with four entry doorways with staircases and Greek temple fronts, one in each direction — just as in families certain features suddenly recur double or fourfold.

There, walking across the marble, between trompe l'oeil frescos of pilasters and divine figures, making the interior look like an exterior, he first noticed the dark-blond woman in the party. While he looked at an illustration of Diana hunting with her breast bared and a black dog, he suddenly felt her eyes focused on him. In a long white dress, with her hair worn loosely up, and her head slightly bent, which made her smile and the look in her large brown eyes even more sensual, she was standing on the other side of the Rotonda, near a depiction of a swaggering Hercules. He found it unpleasant. It interrupted his concentration, and he tried to ignore it; but back in the bus, too, where he was sitting in the front seat, he noticed that she was constantly looking at the back of his head. She was fifteen or twenty years older than him, but even if she'd been young, he still wouldn't have liked it. Those kinds of things were not for him. He knew that for many boys and girls there was nothing else, that it existed mainly for Max and possibly for his father too; he was less sure about his Granny, and he didn't want to think of his mother at all in this connection. For him sexuality had as little meaning as sports — up to now at least. He felt it was something for people who wanted to reproduce, but he had no need. He was sufficient unto himself.