Chapter One
Amsterdam 1758
The evening on which I came to see everything in a new light, I was
planning to dine, as I did every Thursday, with Mr. Jamieson, a
wholesaler of skins and tobacco, and then perhaps to go dancing with
him. It was only after an attack of gout had forced the good
merchant to cancel our appointment that I decided to visit my box at
the theater.
Don’t misunderstand me. I am not used to luxury. Since the calamity,
I have been at life’s mercy and am very frugal. I’ve had to be. For
a long time I had no idea what the next day would bring: whether I
would go hungry, whether anyone would shelter me, whether I would be
attacked and forced to move on. Even after I’d finally attained a
certain status in Amsterdam, I always limited myself to a bare
minimum of finery-only what was expected in the circles I was
obliged to move in and the sundries I needed to practice my
profession. I never allowed myself extravagance. Nor did I feel the
want of any. In the last couple of years, however, I did allow
myself one thing: a permanent box seat at the French theater on the
Overtoom, which I visited whenever time permitted.
I was on my way there that evening in mid-October. As usual, I had
hired a small but respectable boat. There was a chill in the air. In
Amsterdam the cold on the canals is worse than in Venice. More
piercing and insidious, it sets in months earlier and tends to
settle in the bones rather than the lungs. All the same, I prefer a
boat to a carriage. The people on the quays tend to ignore those who
pass them on the water. More or less unnoticed, I am able to study
others at my leisure. On the evening in question I was doing just
that, partly for my own amusement and partly for professional
reasons.
In the curve of the Herengracht, two gentlemen caught my eye. One of
them I already knew: Jan Rijgerbos, a stockbroker. A friendly,
cultivated widower, Rijgerbos is fit, well built, and undemanding.
His companion was unknown to me. He had a dark complexion and a
striking profile. It was the latter feature that immediately
attracted my attention. His appearance touched me in a way I could
not explain. I asked the boatman to row faster so that we might stay
abreast of the two men walking on the quay, and I continued to study
the stranger. His face was oval, and a blond wig framed it to
advantage. Although not particularly handsome, he soon aroused my
desire quite unexpectedly.
This annoyed me.
I am the one who arouses desire.
He was too slight for me anyway, I decided. What’s more, dressed as
he was according to the latest Paris fashion-in breeches of yellow
silk that showed his calves-he cut an absurd figure in such bleak
weather. I lost interest and began surveying the other pedestrians.
As we passed under the Leidsebrug, however, Rijgerbos and his friend
were just crossing it and I managed to catch a snatch of their
conversation. They were speaking French: one with difficulty, the
other with apparent ease. I liked the sound of the Frenchman’s voice
and ordered the boatman to stop beneath the arches of the bridge. We
waited there in the shadows until the two men were out of sight.
Were it not for the recklessly low neckline I was wearing, or that
my thoughts that evening were far from elevated, or that I am
scarcely the kind of woman a higher power would squander ten minutes
of thought on-were it not for any of these incontrovertible facts,
you might imagine that God, or maybe the devil, had arranged the
whole thing for His entertainment. A coincidence like this! How rare
it is that we are allowed a glimpse of the grand scheme within which
all our lives are arranged. All the years of being buffeted by fate
had not prepared me for what would follow. All that time I had been
constantly on guard. And now, just as I was beginning to think that
fortune had finally grown bored with tossing me about, it rose up
again, coming to feral attention to seize me by the throat.
This time I cannot but accept that some catastrophes do have a
purpose. It does make sense to persevere. I have been furnished with
proof of that. Or at least, God willing, I soon will be.
I took my seat as usual shortly after the performance had begun, so
as to offend as few spectators as possible. The opera was an old
pastoral play that had recently been put to music by a composer from
Grenoble. The performers were mainly the theater’s regular company,
and ovations welcomed the favorites. The lead, a shepherdess, was
being played by a soprano who had triumphed in this role all over
Europe.
Midway through the first act, Jan Rijgerbos knocked at the door of
my box.
“Well, this is a surprise,” I said. “I had no idea you liked the
theater. I don’t recall ever seeing you here before.”
He was too well bred to show his discomfort at talking to me, but he
did take care to remain out of sight of the audience below. I am
used to that-no harm-and I didn’t hold it against him.
“I must confess that the music is too mannered to my ear, but what
do I know of it? No, I have a guest, a friend from France. He is
visiting our city as an agent of the French treasury and insists on
attending the theater every evening, as he does in Paris.”
Rijgerbos stepped aside to reveal his guest, whom he introduced as
Monsieur le Chevalier de Seingalt.
“They sold us our seats in the pit with the assurance that we’d have
the best view of the performance,” the man said in French, bowing to
kiss my hand. “But no one warned us that the evening’s most
beguiling spectacle would not be onstage.”
There is nothing a man can say to a woman that I haven’t heard
before. Compliments about appearance in particular always depress
me, especially on a first meeting. From the outset, their sense of
obligation seems to weary them. Dispatched on a mission they have no
faith in, they inevitably stumble, like plow horses pressed to
perform dressage, and their fatigue in the face of the task is
evident from the outset. Some women live for sweet talk. I would
rather go without. But how is a man to know that? Most aim to please
with little understanding of our pleasure.
I cordially invited the gentlemen to join me in the box. Jan
concealed himself behind the curtain, but Seingalt stepped forward
unembarrassed in full view of everyone below. The yellow silk of his
conspicuous suit seemed to light up in the glow of the downstage
candles.
It was only when he was sure all eyes were upon us that he sat down
and deliberately slid his chair closer to mine. This could mean only
one of two things: Either Jan had told him nothing about me, or he
had told him everything and Monsieur le Chevalier was an absolute
fire-eater. Either way, I decided to like him.
We listened to the rest of the aria in silence, I all the while
aware of Seingalt looking at me. He was trying to make out the
outline of my face through the lace I was wearing as a veil.
Although I knew he would not succeed, his attempt disturbed me. I
had to master my breathing to avoid betraying my excitement. His
eyes, large and black under heavy lids, would wander, sometimes down
over my body, sometimes up in the hope of catching my expression.
When the big chandeliers were lit for the interval, I moved aside
into the shadows. The chevalier began to inform me of his recent
arrival from Paris and of his mission to ease France’s beleaguered
financial position by selling to the Dutch French government bonds
that had depreciated because of the war. He was staying at the Star
of the East, on the corner of the Nes and the Kuipersteeg. When he
said this, he probed once more for an expression on my face, to no
avail. Eventually he asked what no one in his position had dared to
ask before: whether I would reward his friendly curiosity by
allowing him a glimpse of my countenance. He was clearly unused to a
woman’s refusing him anything, because later he tried again, less
politely. Finally he asked forthrightly why I would begrudge him
something for which his desire had only deepened as we spoke.
“If you owned a valuable gem,” I said, “you wouldn’t oblige everyone
who asked to gawk at it, would you?”
He smiled, conceding. “No, I would keep it in perfect safety.”
“That is just how I keep myself, monsieur.”
From the day I first decided to wear a veil, I have found its effect
on men to be remarkable. More than anything, men want that which has
been withheld. A happy certainty is no match for a mystery denied.
Given a choice, a man will always take the unknown.
“This gem of yours must be unique in the world,” the savior of
France remarked with a pout, letting his gaze glide mischievously
down my bare throat, “considering that you have no qualms about
exposing other treasures to the idle gawker.”
“Give up, sir,” I advised. “You have met your match.”
I toyed with him a little longer until he fell silent and pretended
that the singers, who had returned to the stage, were demanding his
attention. Not to dash his hopes entirely, I opened my fan and laid
it on the plush before him, a sign well understood all over Europe.
For years I was accustomed to seeing myself in the eyes of others. I
judged myself by their reactions to me. The looks they gave me were
the key to who I was. Then I hit upon the idea of drawing a curtain
over all that.
At first I covered my face only to go out. Constraining myself in
this fashion, I found a freedom I could remember only from my
earliest childhood. Since putting on the veil, I have lived as if
reborn. Unseen by others, I have no need to look at myself.
Delivered from the image that had eclipsed my every other sense of
reality, I move once again through a world without danger, like a
child among protective elders. They allow me more latitude, no
longer seeing me as one of them. I don’t have to join in their
serious discussions. While they sit at table, I imagine myself
crawling around on the floor between their legs. Children are aware
of the judgment of adults but don’t let it weigh on them. That is
the lightheartedness I rediscovered in my disguise. And it pleased
me so much that in the last few years I have drawn my veil over
almost all my waking hours, even at home, sometimes even alone. At
work I always wrap myself in it. It’s what has made me so
successful.
The play takes a dramatic turn. The squire warns the shepherdess:
His son may be in love with her, but he will be disinherited if they
marry. To preserve her beloved’s happiness, she pretends to love
another, then abandons her flock to join a convent. Just after she
has become a bride of Christ, the lovesick youth comes knocking at
the gate. He has discovered the whole scheme, but too late. She
allows him one last look at her beauty. Then she dons the wimple and
is lost to him forever.
“What desecration!” Seingalt sighed, as the soprano disappeared
under her habit. His indignation was genuine and the words just
slipped out. “Hiding something so beautiful; that must surely count
as a mortal sin!”
“I am happy to leave the judgment of our sins to Him who invented
them, monsieur.”
He looked at me with a wry smile. “Perhaps He would take the same
opportunity to explain why someone like you would choose to hide
herself.”
Soon after, I closed my fan and put it away. Heroines who sacrifice
themselves needlessly should not count on my sympathy. I’m annoyed
by silly geese who let their minds overrule their emotions, and glad
to see them get what they deserve. Rather than sit through the rest
of the act, I asked the gentlemen to excuse me. The pastoral was
upsetting, and I come to the opera to be diverted, not disturbed.
It was hardly the first time I had been accused of hiding behind my
veil. A frequent misconception, since quite the opposite is true.
I hide the world.
I have lowered a curtain before it.
Through that haze of lace and silk it looks so much softer.
Chapter Two
I don’t remember any boundaries. Pasiano, the estate where I was
born, extended out over the hills as far as the eye could see. The
doors were always open. I could walk for hours and, whichever way I
went, everything was familiar. My parents never worried about me. In
the morning, when I raced off after a bird or a rabbit, they weren’t
afraid to see me disappear. They knew that by midday the smells
spreading out over the fields from the kitchens would lure me home
for lunch. While still young I befriended the horses in the meadows,
and in time they let me ride them, with my hands clinging to their
manes and my heels in their flanks. The chicks from the fowl yard
were my toys, and the overseer’s dogs were my playmates. Together we
rolled down the golden slopes and ran through the woods. The streams
in the valleys were warm and shallow, and until my tenth birthday
the gamekeepers were forbidden to set traps. At Pasiano there was no
danger. There were no limits to my happiness. I spent my childhood
fearless and unjudged.
I had no reason to believe that things in the world beyond its
grounds were any different.
Like everyone else, I learned to feel before I learned to think. It
was only after people had begun to teach me that I began to
distinguish things and recognize facts. But I never put what I was
taught above the things I knew intuitively. Even now, I am reluctant
to admit disagreeable realities. Self-delusion has the benefit of
letting us believe that everything is still possible. I have a
talent for that. It makes me feel less afraid. Were the devil
staring me straight in the face, I would still convince myself that
my visitor was an angel. I’m sure I could even set Lucifer to
doubting.
I believe in dreams. I understand them, feel at home in them. For my
first fourteen years, I lived one. That doesn’t mean I won’t see the
truth. I actually see it much too clearly.
(Continues…)
Knopf
Copyright © 2005
Arthur Japin
All right reserved.
ISBN: 1-4000-4464-2
Excerpted from In Lucia’s Eyes
by Arthur Japin
Copyright © 2005 by Arthur Japin.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
