Tulip Fever (36 page)

“Batavia?”

“At first light tomorrow. On the
Empress of the East
.” As he speaks, Sophia’s rosy nipples swim in front of his eyes. He feels a surge of chivalry. It fights with his jealousy and lust; after a short struggle, it wins. “It is not your wife’s fault, sir. She is not the one to blame. My master persuaded her to do it.” She, too, has been deluded by this wicked man; her virtue has been destroyed by him, just as he destroyed Jacob’s career. “She didn’t mean you any harm, I am sure. I watched them, I should know. He persuaded her to do it against her better judgment.”

Mr. Sandvoort thanks him. Turning to leave, he knocks against a cabinet. The knives rattle. And then he is gone.

Jacob returns to his painting. He gazes with satisfaction at the chalk figure, bowed with shame. Let Jan take the blame, for he has sinned and now he shall be punished.

Jacob picks up his chalk and gets to work.

65

Cornelis

Life is half spent before we know what it is.

—JACOB CATS, Moral Emblems, 1632

It is midnight by the time Cornelis arrives home. He closes the door and stands in the front room. Maria has left the oil lamp burning. Its light glows on the blind wooden panels hanging on the wall. His paintings have turned their beautiful faces away so that they cannot see what is happening. Art creates a world of peace; the bloodiest murders—the massacre of the innocents, Christ’s crucifixion— they are distilled into beauty. The slaughtered John the Baptist cannot feel pain, for he is eternal and removed from the raw grief of those who have to continue living.

Cornelis looks at the cabinet of precious silverware, at the great rooms receding into the darkness. How greedily he has filled this place with treasures, but it is all an illusion. Sophia has realized this. She has given it all up for love and cast herself adrift.
Don’t blame her for it
, said the boy. Cornelis does not blame her, not now. For if she can give it up, so can he.

Cornelis climbs the stairs. He can no longer remain in this house, the object of gossip and pity—no doubt of ridicule too. He pulls a canvas bag out of the closet and starts packing. A weight has been lifted from him; he feels as light and free as the night, a hundred years ago, in another life, when he lost his faith. (
Last night; it was last
night
.) He knows what he is going to do now. Sophia is alive. She has been led astray by a man who is unworthy of her—the boy confirmed what Cornelis suspected all along. It was Jan who made her do it and he will pay for it with his life.

They’re sailing at dawn
. . . There is no time to lose. Cornelis pulls the straps tight and carries the bag downstairs. He is traveling light. Upstairs, the closets groan with his clothes, the shed skins of his vanity. He has sloughed off the burden of years; he feels like a young man again. Sophia thinks that he is a boring old pedant. He will show her how wrong she is. He, too, is capable of an impulsive act, all in the name of love.

And nobody will punish him
. This is his deepest secret, the secret that sets him free. For he, and he alone, knows that God does not exist. He, and he alone, will take responsibility for his actions. Cornelis has stepped into the modern world, a brave new era of human accountability. He walks past the Bible, lying open on the lectern, and closes it with a thud.

He makes his way down the steps into the kitchen. In the fireplace the embers still glow. The room smells of fried onions and tomcat. He approaches the half-curtained bed and holds out the candle to look inside. Willem and Maria lie together, sleeping. The fish seller’s rubbery lips are parted; he exhales hoarsely. Maria’s breath whistles in her nostrils. Between their faces is a tuft of dark hair; their daughter slumbers between them.

Cornelis feels a stab of pain. How contented they look. He is an intruder on their happiness. They have their baby; for them, all is well. Cornelis’s throat is dry; he can barely swallow. Already, before he has relinquished it, he is a stranger in his own home.

He leaves the note, and a banker’s draft, on the kitchen table.

I am going overseas. It may be for a long time. If something should befall me and I do not return, I leave this house to you and your daughter, for in the eyes of the world she is my heir. It is only we ourselves who know the truth. Keep it close to your hearts.

Please settle this payment on behalf of my wife’s family, for they are innocents in this affair. I wish you all happiness. Turn the paintings round and enjoy their beauty, for they shall outlast us all.

C. S.

The port never sleeps. It is ruled by the tides and they obey no clocks. Barrels are being unloaded from the fishing boats. Someone is whistling a tune Cornelis has not heard since he was a boy. A mongrel bitch, her dugs so heavy with milk that they drag on the ground, walks stiffly on bowed legs.
We must engage a wet nurse
. How humiliatingly he has been duped. All his wealth and education, to be hoaxed by a simple servant girl. The world has indeed been turned upside down.

Yet how sweetly they slumbered. His anger has disappeared; his resentment is all but gone. Maria has acted wickedly but Cornelis knows that no punishment awaits her; she can sleep soundly. In truth, the reunion with her sweetheart, the untangling of their misunderstanding, touched his heart. They will bring life back to those rooms; he feels like a woody old bush, old growth, cleared away to let in the sunshine. New shoots will grow in his space.

Cornelis thinks: a daughter has drifted in and out of my life; one blink and she has gone.

He feels strangely exhilarated. In the darkness he recognizes faces—Samuel Solomon, the Jewish cotton merchant, who stands by the quay watching bales being unloaded; the blind beggar for whom day and night are meaningless. This port is Cornelis’s home from home. The odor of the sea is in his nostrils; it is the smell of his wealth and of his working life. Like Willem, the ocean has delivered up his livelihood and now he will finally deliver up himself to her mercies. And when he has left, all this bustle will carry on as if he has never been a part of it at all.

The sky is flushed pink. Among the rigging he sees the tall masts of the
Empress of the East
. His wife and her lover will already be aboard. Cornelis has no compunction about killing Jan. It will take place when they have left land far behind; the waves will swallow up the evidence, for they have swallowed up worse secrets than this. Cornelis knows the captain well. The man’s silence can be bought for twenty florins; for forty florins more he will arrange for the deed to be done. Besides, he owes Cornelis a favor.

And when Jan has gone to his watery grave Cornelis will reclaim his wife and they will sail to Batavia together and live on his nutmeg plantation. Despite everything, he still loves her—look, he has given up everything for her. She will learn to love him because he has changed; he is no longer the man she married; he himself can no longer recognize that man. Anything, now, is possible.

Life is short; time is fleeting.
Grasp it while you can
, said the painter. And for once Cornelis has to agree with him.

Cornelis takes one last look at his beloved city, pearly in the dawn. The fog has lifted, the fog of his befuddled past; a thrilling and terrible dawn has broken. The clear blue skies of reason await him, and a new life with the woman whom he reclaimed once and whom he will reclaim again.

He buys his passage and boards the ship. He is only just in time. A few minutes later she weighs anchor and sets sail for the East.

66

Jan

Symptoms of tulip virus: Patterns of yellow discoloration (mosaics, ringspots, mottles) are common. Cause: Sub-microscopicvirus particles in the sap of infected plants may be transmitted to healthy tissues by sap-feeding pests such as aphids, by nematodes or other soil-borne pests.

—ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY, Encyclopaedia of Gardening

Early in 1637 the tulip market crashes. The High Court of Holland, appalled at the national hysteria, intervenes and overnight bulbs are declared worthless. Thousands of people are made destitute. They throw themselves into the canals; they deliver themselves up to the mercy of the charitable institutions; in churches throughout the land they bitterly repent their folly. This curious episode sinks back into the margin of history, an episode that testifies to man’s greed and the fickleness of fate. Yet it all stems from a love of beauty, a passion for flowers whose lives are even briefer than those who are in thrall to them. The fact that the most valuable of these blooms—the most spectacular mutations—are produced by a viral disease will be an irony discovered only in future years. If the predicants had known at the time, what sermons would they have thundered from their pulpits!

When men woke from their dream the blooms had withered but the paintings remained. Lovers, when parted, find solace in a portrait of their beloved. In centuries to come people will find balm in a beauty that once caused such suffering.

And Jan van Loos, through pain, will find greatness.
You
have to be courageous, my friend
, said Mattheus.
Only through
pain will the beauty of the world be revealed
. After losing Sophia he becomes a recluse. He rents another studio in his old neighborhood and devotes himself to his art. He specializes in
vanitas
paintings—canvases that show, through the humblest of objects, the transience of life. An onion— he often paints an onion—lies next to a sandglass, a broken bread roll, a skull. Food becomes a sacrament; a transcendental homeliness, like incense, infuses his work. Out of suffering he creates great art. And in many of his paintings there is a curved mirror, a wineglass or a silver jug. Reflected in these is not the painter, hard at work. It is a woman, in a cobalt-blue dress, with soft brown hair. Her mirrored image haunts his paintings but her identity will never be confirmed, though scholars will see a resemblance in the bold, passionate nudes of 1636, where the woman gazes with such candid love out of her frame.