The Sign of Jonah

Boeli van Leeuwen

• Publisher: The Permanent Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781579621452
• eBook ISBN:
  9781504023269
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

In his daily wanderings around Willemstad, Curaçao, an old man comes into contact with the underbelly of society: drunks, bums, thieves, and drop-outs. He stays out as late as possible because he is afraid of his fearful dreams about the horse of John—as described in the Apocalypse.

Part I

The Horse of John the Apostle

Among my incurable convictions is the belief that the old are eternally ugly, the young eternally beautiful. The wisdom of the old is eternally murky, the actions of the young eternally transparent. The longer people live, the worse they become.

Human life, in other words, is an upside-down process of decline and fall.

—Yukio Mishima

I once read an article that began as follows: “I am a token black and I sit by the door. And when it is time to smile, I smile.”

That statement pleases me no end. A great philosopher, that man! How great becomes apparent from the rest of his story: he plays baseball with his little sons, looks for his forefathers in the jungles of Africa, plays in a jazz quartet, and stood under the balcony on which Martin Luther King was assassinated. But when it’s time to smile, I smile.

A smile has hardly left my lips since. It is a new gift I offer a community who accepts it with gratitude. “You’d better smile, partner, when you call me son of a bitch.” Pull your face into a different fold, bare your teeth, and call somebody “you old fart, you” instead of “you son of a bitch you.”

“Keep smiling,” says my browny, and goes on about happiness on the other side of the rainbow and silver linings in dark clouds. I smile and caress her enormous behind: a nocturnal landscape, full of hills and valleys, gulleys and bomb craters. Malicious friends suggested I should submit a proposal to the authorities to subdivide this conversation piece behind. I smile and promise to think about it. My wife also finds me more tolerant these days, even though I spew forth the same snide remarks as before.

I once—my God, how long ago—asked one of the indigenous of the Leidseplein in Amsterdam why there is no mention in the Bible of Jesus smiling. “It seems to me,” said I, “he did rake up a few real successes here and there in spite of all the drawbacks.”

The poet in question, whose beard seemed to lead a symbiotic existence with his shaggy sweater, looked at me with sympathy and said: “Jesus wasn’t just a stand-up comedian, nor were the apostles exactly a barrel of laughs, either.” Words of wisdom, little pearls before swine.

They call me “professor” on the island, not without mockery, because I am supposed to know important things. While the scissors tremble above my right ear, flapping their wings, I have to explain to the hair dresser what that man Einstein was really all about. He’s not interested in details, “just give me the broad picture.” E = mc² in a colorful KLM bag.

On the sidewalk café a waiter asks me how an atom bomb “works,” not that he wants to know the exact whereabouts of every little thread or screw, but he wants to see the broad outlines. And the chain reaction soon finds itself reduced to the pampuna effect, the speed at which gossip can spread over the whole island.

The watchmaker, in his glittering long and narrow little shop, is only interested in words “in and of themselves.” I bring him a new supply every day. Enzyme. Protoplasm. Pulsar. Transsubstantiation. Thank God he’s not the least bit interested in what they mean. “Protoplasm,” he says, softly, tinkering intently with the innards of a minuscule ladies’ watch. “Protoplasm, what do you know.” Every inhabitant of the island builds a small baroque palace in his mind that is not founded on pillars of systematic knowledge, but on swirling columns of imagination. My poor brain is considered a junk shop: everybody is welcome to poke around in it and to take some stuff home to go tinker with in his own little palace.

We don’t trust intellectuals here, and their statements are suspect in advance. Knowledge acquired in Holland is simply “ko’i sabi,” or quasi-wisdom, a.k.a. bullshit. People call on lawyers, notaries, and bankers with great reluctance, in the sheer knowledge that one is abandoned to the tricks of their trade. We are ahead of our time, since the computer is sure to make all these parasitic jobs obsolete once and for all a hundred years from now.

Woe to the writer who feels called upon to play the artist, or the academician who dares exhibit the slightest trace of arrogance. Nan kabes a susha! Respect is reserved for people whose behind never graced any bench in any institution of learning:

Johan Rib, the wise carpenter, or Antoine Maduro, who speaks many languages. The only exception to this rule was Moises Frumencio da Costa Gomez, but then he was a Ph.Dd., with a lower case “d” thrown in for good measure. But people laugh at iguanologists, lobster experts, macro-economists and whoever got their first degree on a scholarship to Holland.

“Listen, professor,” says the man who sells sneakers and pornographic pictures, “yesterday I happened to sell some Danish stuff to a man”—he produces a well-thumbed calling card from his back pocket and stares at it—“a man who is an E-CO-LOGIST. That man gets upset about beer bottles by the roadside and abandoned cars along the coast, and here we are, sitting on an atom bomb.” I had to explain to him that—biologists excepted—all people who do not know what to do with their lives become “ogists”: sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, comparative religiologists, politicologists … He raises an imploring hand: “Hold it right there. Politicologists! You mean they actually teach such shit as politics? The mind boggles. Utterly. Basta.”

On the other hand there is a great ability to face the mysteries of this life with the most open of minds. Market women study horoscopes and a bum has a new angle on Nostradamus. A fisherman from Venezuela tells me Adam came from another planet. This from a man who never read the befuddled Von Däniken and never took any time to study with the Mormons. A whore was visited by the Holy Virgin and Mother who addressed her in stern, yet loving words. All is possible, therefore all things exist. You will never hear anyone say: “Come on now, you’re pulling my leg, you don’t make sense. Where does it get you?” among the likes of us. Here people say: “Nichevo,” to be translated as “¡Quien sabe!” But people don’t want to be taken for a ride either. I don’t remember how often my story about Newton and the apple falling has been interrupted by the sensible question: “But how does that gravitational pull work anyway? Who pushes and who pulls? And if they do, how?” Makes you look like an idiot.

We invented the perpetuum mobile. Soaked in my own sweat, under red hot tin roofs, I have been able to see with my own eyes the miracle of water that always ran back to a source only to rise up again to the top of a minaret.

A fisherman at Boka Sami once showed me a fish he said was “older than all animals on the world, because it can walk under water.” And sure enough, the little monster had legs under its belly with membranes between the toes and long nails, like those of an iguana.

We here think Europe suffers from constipation: there are no new horizons any more, no frontiers of the mind. Culture has come to a dead end in Proust’s cork-lined room. No new oceans, continents, or revelations, but an expedition in search of things past. I can tell simple people about the wanderings of Odysseus and the adventures of captain Ahab and his white whale. They listen breathlessly to the voyages of Paul, the tentmaker. But what am I to do with Mr. Proust in his darkroom of Damocles, Mr. Samuel Beckett, half buried on the stage, and all those sob stories of guys worrying about their dads?

Once I showed the Russian version of War and Peace to half-wasted, emaciated men in a home for homeless alcoholics. They watched this masterpiece of the greatest novelist of all times for nine hours and their comments, sensible and to the point, stayed with me for months. Sometimes a bum called Pedro Lina, who runs around with hundreds of pithy sayings in a jute bag, appears straight from the reading room with a novel written by a strident feminist and wants me to explain it to him. I then have to admit that the book is nothing but an attempt at camouflaging the horror vacui. But I say it with a wry smile, so as not to make the words hit home too hard. Pedro has no problem with a statement of Goethe’s: “Women are driven by one central urge.”

The passing years have turned me into a well-known street philosopher.

I wander around town all day, but according to my own rigorous schedule. Eight o’clock finds me on the little sidewalk café near the Fallopian tube to our harbor, there to discuss the political events of the moment with a battered and vengeful journalist: who changed sides and how much Boeboei got paid. Coalitions are being considered, a breakthrough is expected, and after a while there we sit, looking dejectedly at each other: what a godforsaken mess, how did we ever get saddled with that band of godless baboons? Later that morning we are joined at our table by the permanent industrialist, who starts new projects at regular intervals: a lobster farm, a peanut butter factory, a refinery for laxatives, a journal for astrologists. The projects fail without fail, but without denting his enthusiasm in the least. He draws diagrams on the table, writes formulas on his cuffs, gropes around in his bag to show us xeroxed articles and always finishes with the same sigh: “Those son-of-a-bitch politicians just let the importers grow rich and the creative minds on their own island can go to hell.”

At ten I move along to Gomez square. There my old friend stands in his bronze three-piece suit, with real buttons on his jacket and sturdy shoes on his feet, the raised right hand grown rigid in an admonishing gesture. Weather-beaten and buffeted by the wind, shat upon by cooing pigeons, he stands, not having diddly squat to do with the man of flesh and blood I used to know, with his expressive hands, tobacco-colored eyes, and pert little ass. The base of his statue exhibits a saying somebody stole from the Bible and translated into bad Papiamentu.

I receive our tourists at the sidewalk café, nervous Jewish ladies from New York, flashing and tinkling like cannibals, imprisoned in chains of gold and silver and with earrings big as wheels. Their husbands, candidates for early heart attacks, slouch heavily and despondently in their chairs. They always tell me the same story: the food is bad, the service worse, the streets dirty, the stuff expensive, but what the hell, we try to have some fun anyway. They always move in herds, like fearful cows that sense the gathering storm. Before they have finished their coffee the tour guide appears to prod them on across the island.

At eleven I go to a Chinese restaurant, whose proprietor I cannot understand: he suddenly flies off the handle from time to time for no apparent reason, throwing down his notebook and pen, shouting at the waiters and the customers, and then just as suddenly calming down. This man’s antennae are undoubtedly aimed at the planet Uranus; not a soul understands him; in the meantime he’s becoming a millionaire.

In the afternoon I sleep the best sleep of the day: deep, sound, and without dreams. A fan blows a sultry breeze across my body to shoo away insects.

Late in the afternoon I (sometimes) go bathe and (sometimes) have a shave to embark on an aimless quest in the warm streets of Willemstad. A deadly boredom then drives me from one person to another, but I always go home as late as possible, because I know the horse of John the Apostle is waiting for me there.

I lie down on the bed and close my eyes. I vegetate, I exist, I’m still alive, there is nothing, I am lonely and dare not fall asleep because I have to avoid the horse of John the Apostle.

I desire a sign, but I know I shall not receive any other than that of Jonah, the prophet. The time is nigh, for the pale horse of the apocalypse, sallow and emaciated, its thin neck bent, slowly steps through my soul. I wake up in the deepest hollow of the night, soaked in sweat, and beg for a sign. But when I extend my hand I hit that scrawny rib cage. I feel the old heart beating in the palm of my hand, slowly and with great effort: muffled strokes of the kettledrum on a worn membrane. Chilled with fear, I grope for my wife’s hand under the covers. But the sleeping woman’s hand is like a small and warm animal and lacks the ability to comfort.

I have been meeting this horse somewhere in time and space all my life, and I knew, long before I had read John’s Apocalypse, that the realm of the dead would follow behind those worn shanks. I never saw a rider on its sagging back. It stood waiting for me, unsaddled, a skeleton with a shadowy skin stretched across it.

When I was still a child it would appear on the porch of our house in the morning light, the color of mother-of-pearl. Framed by the post of the big door, that horse has been etched in my memory forever. The plump legs shaggy-haired, under bony knees, the tail worn down like an old broom, the head like an anvil, too heavy for the emaciated neck: there it stood, absurd and awesome at the same time. I could see the vertebrae on its back, lying under the skin like small pebbles, and I could smell a sweet smell of musk. Snot was dripping from its pink nostrils and white foam bubbled from the corners of its mouth. It seemed to have come running from the other side of the earth: you could almost feel the fatigue that consumed it.

It suddenly stamped on the threshold with one hoof and lifted its head with great effort. I was looking straight into its sad, timeless eyes and saw myself reflected in miniature in the wet membranes: a boy with his hair cut close to the skull and his lips trembling. And once again it stamped on the threshold of our house, turned around, and began to trot. It was as if its joints had rusted with a mechanical rheumatism so that it could only move ahead with pain and effort. It slowly trudged past the birdhouse, in which colorful birds fluttered away, startled, and past the cistern, out onto the dusty road. It slowly became smaller and smaller, until it seemed to dissolve in the trembling of the hot air.

In the Great War I saw the horse of John the Apostle standing in a burning shop window in a bombed-out city, between mannequins that melted obscenely into each other and into visions of Hieronymus Bosch. It stood there against a background of flaming curtains, patient and resigned, covered with ashes and paper burnt to cinders, between melting monsters from hell. There it was, on its stage, so old, so sad, so dispirited.

The words of the prophet swept through me like a bolt of lightning: And I saw, and see, a pale horse, and he who was sitting on it, his name was death, and the realm of the dead followed behind him.

Nobody ever saw he who was sitting on it; death is impossible to portray: skeletons and black capes belong in ghost stories and horror movies.

When I was a university student I once ended up in a carnival circus in the South of Holland, drunk as a skunk … loooook! arrows of fire are climbing into the sky over there, and our wheel of fortune is spinning right here: take a number, ladies and gentlemen, take a number, get a ticket! You could win a teddy bear or a chocolate doll, take a chance, live a little! Try the funhouse mirrors: a concave husband stands next to his convex wife and their children have rubber legs. Put your hand in the gypsy woman’s little starling claw and she will see into the future behind morning’s blue mountains great happiness for you … Watch the ugly toothless lion jump through a hoop of flames and dapper little dogs scamper between the legs of cackling clowns. And there! on a camel with a skin like a stained carpet, a tawny dancer keeps her balance with varicose veins like blue rivers under the pale skin, panting in the perilous space under the tent; and a tiger, lost in his morphine daze, this caricature of “tiger! tiger! burning bright” shits on the boot of the awe-inspiring tamer. Et voilà, a real Hungarian countess Esterhazy (my father had great estates in Austria) bobbing up and down on a pregnant mare in slow gallop across the stinking sawdust in the arena. Dwarfs waddling throughout the spectacle like parrots on their bent little legs; clowns in dirty underwear squatting on the steps of their wagons; and there … with a slow gait tired as death, step after painful step, the horse of John the Apostle came toward me.

Centuries revolved around it. It has walked through the hell of human suffering, followed by wars and hunger, pestilence and the black death. Its back seemed to break under the weight of this suffering, since the realm of death followed behind it.

It stood still in front of me and with great effort lifted up its head, hewn from uranium, with great effort and in the mirrors of its eyes I could see the young man I was then, drunk and dashing, but also pale with fright, a hand raised to my mouth. Later, in the dark brown neighborhood café, among slurring farmers and their screeching wives, I could not raise my glass of Dutch gin to my mouth without spilling some.

I met it twice in Spain: the first time in a gypsy camp, where it sat waiting for my arrival, enveloped in its mystery. The camp’s leader, a slippery guy with lots of gold in his mouth and a right hand like a crab (only the thumb and the index finger had escaped the knife), asked me if I wanted to buy it, but his sales pitch was not convincing, he didn’t really dare to fully identify himself as the owner and ended up saying with a sigh that the animal had been following his band of nomads for years, without grazing or drinking. The price was negotiable, but I would have to go get it myself.

I tasted fear and uncertainty, and in the end we both stood staring in silence at that pale shadow among the age-old olive trees, and suddenly it turned around and began to walk away. The gypsy looked at me with distrust, in the intuitive knowledge that it had been waiting there for my arrival.

I found it again in Sevilla, among a poor group of abandoned horses, destined to be gored by bulls. I asked the picador, a heavy Basque man with bloodshot eyes, in which corrida they were going to use it. He spat on the ground and said: “That carcass goes to the glue factory: look at it, a back like a hammock, who could ever sit on it, vaya hombre,” and he shrugged his shoulders.

And then that hair-raising encounter in Paraguana, in the mysterious desert called Médanos. In that purple miniature Sahara, where t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Part I: The Horse of John the Apostle
• Part II: Juan Carlos
• Part III: Balboa
• Part IV: Curaçao Festival
• Copyright Page