Lying Low

Rodenbach published Bruges-la-Morte in 1892, and its plates show the city as he wished his widower to find it: quays without boats, windows without faces, water the color of pewter lying still beneath bridges that seem never to have been crossed.

It was the city we found every morning before breakfast.

— ▪︎ ▪︎ ▪︎ —

In the days preceding our crossing to the continent, I had driven myself into a state of nervous exhaustion, poring over records of my former existence and arranging them into an account of myself, until the back of my neck ached. By the time it was over, the nervous machinery had become so accustomed to its own grinding friction that it could no longer be stilled.

In the hotel, I woke at three. The room was dark. I turned into the pillow and tried to force sleep back, but the machinery had already started. I wanted to read, but I couldn't bring myself to wake him with the light, so I lay there, thumbing through the vitreous void and growing furious with my own restlessness. I went back and forth between manic hope and the quiet dread that I had somehow overreached and broken my back for nothing.

The alarm went off at six. I was already hollowed out.

— ▪︎ ▪︎ ▪︎ —

Breakfast was at eight. We were up long before it, so we walked.

The mist came off the canals and stayed. It hung low over the water and softened everything beyond the next bridge, so that the gables further down the quay were only shapes, gray on paler gray. On one bank a single tree had turned, and its leaves lay along the edge of the water in a ragged gold line, the only bright thing in sight.

In the water the houses hung upside down, perfectly still, until something touched the surface and they shook apart. We waited for them to settle. Further on, the mist had swallowed the end of the canal. We went to see what was in it.

— ▪︎ ▪︎ ▪︎ —

We stopped on the Peerdenbrug to take photographs.

I was moving backwards, trying to get more of the canal into the frame, when a man came along the bridge. I lowered the camera and stepped out of his way.

“Anything for a good photo,” he said.

“I know, right,” I said, laughing out of reflex. He laughed too, or smiled.

I’m still not sure we found the same thing funny.

— ▪︎ ▪︎ ▪︎ —

We emerged onto the square, and I looked up at the belfry and thought of the film.

In the film, the city is an ornamental waiting room. Two men are sent here to lie low. They are to look at the sights and wait for a telephone call.

There is plenty in the city to occupy a person while he waits. The swans on the Minnewater; the gilded statues on the Burg; the vermilion folds of Van Eyck’s Madonna. You can spend a long time looking at the drape of painted cloth. Then you remember what you are waiting for.

Purgatory promises eventual release. Its suffering accomplishes something; those who enter it will leave purified, and pass on into the light. Limbo offers no such assurance. There is no fire and no door. You live in longing, without hope.

How would you know which place you had arrived in? There would still be streets to walk, things to look at, hours to fill.

— ▪︎ ▪︎ ▪︎ —

At eight the doors of the breakfast room opened, and the waiting, which had been the best part, was over.

— ▪︎ ▪︎ ▪︎ —