The Flemish Masters
A Pilgrimage in Winter
Antwerp
I have loved her for a long time, and I have done my share of the looking, and I came to Belgium in January because I had begun to suspect that I was being loved in return with a fierceness I had never properly measured, and I wanted to stand in front of the proof of it.
The proof, as it turned out, was four hundred years old and hung in churches.
We came by train because she wanted the country to arrive slowly. We stepped out of the carriage into Antwerpen-Centraal and she stopped on the platform and tilted her head back, her gloved hand still inside mine, her breath rising small and pale into the great vault overhead. They call it the railway cathedral, and the name is not hyperbole: a dome of stone and iron and gilt thrown up over the platforms by men who, in the confident years before the first war, could not imagine a future in which Belgium would be unable to afford anything it wanted, marble in a dozen colors quarried from a dozen countries. She looked up at it a long moment and made no comment, which was its own comment.
The air outside carried the mineral cold of the Scheldt and, under it, the sweetness of waffles from a cart near the Keyserlei. I wore deep navy wool, heavy, cut for me against a wind that had come down off the North Sea with the memory of glacial things still in it. She wore charcoal cashmere to the calf and the scent I will not name, because to name it would be to reduce it. We had dressed, without discussing it, in the same color, the color of the winter city itself, and I did not notice until a shop window gave us back to ourselves, the two of us in greys against the greys of Antwerp, and I thought we looked less like people who had arrived in the city than like something the city had quietly produced.
Antwerp in January does not try to be liked, and I have always preferred cities that don’t. This was Rubens’s town. He had been born elsewhere and made himself here, the most successful painter who ever lived, a man who ran a workshop the size of a small factory and was sent across Europe as a diplomat because kings trusted a man who could see that well, and he had filled the churches of his city with paint the way a wealthy man fills his rooms with light. We had come for two of them.
We walked to it across the Grote Markt, past the guild houses standing shoulder to shoulder with their gilded gables, past the fountain where a bronze boy flings a severed hand into the air. The city’s name, they will tell you, comes from that hand: hand werpen, the throwing of the hand, after a giant who once took a toll from every boatman on the Scheldt and lost his own hand to a young Roman who cut it off and threw it in the river. It is almost certainly not true, and the city has kept the story anyway, cast in bronze in its main square, because a place is entitled to prefer its legend to its facts.
The Cathedral of Our Lady carries the tallest Gothic spire in the Low Countries, a single finger of stone and lace four hundred feet into the grey, and the mist settled on our shoulders as we came in under it, her hand staying in mine. Inside, the nave opened in a hush of stone and cold light, the winter sun arriving in muted washes of blue and amber through windows that had outlasted bombardments and iconoclasms and revolutions, that had been smashed and replaced and smashed again and were still, against the odds and the centuries, letting the light in. Her Highness reached for my hand. We found The Raising of the Cross in the left transept.
It struck like a thunderclap. A diagonal explosion of straining flesh and contorted limbs, the great cross hauled upward by executioners whose every tendon stood taut, every face twisted into the grimace of hard labor done in the service of cruelty. And at the center, Christ. Not the pale ethereal figure of lesser paintings but a man, fully and terribly and magnificently human, his body defined by the agony of the position, his face raised into an expression I could not at first name and then could.
I looked at her. She was not looking at the painting. She was looking at me looking at the painting, and when she caught me she did not look away.
“You see it,” she said.
“I do.”
We crossed to the right transept, to the Descent from the Cross.
If the Raising had been a shout, this was a whisper. Christ’s body came down the canvas in a long diagonal of pale flesh caught in a winding sheet like a river of silk, lowered by mourners whose grief was four hundred years old and still unbearably present. The Virgin broken in the particular stillness of a parent who has watched her child die. The Magdalene cradling his feet. John the Evangelist’s red cloak burning against the dark. Rubens, who had everything the world can give a man and gave it back to his city in altarpieces, understood that the lowering of a body is heavier than the raising of one, because the raising is done in hope and the lowering is done in knowledge.
“He loved them,” Her Highness said softly.
“Yes.”
“You love like that,” she said.
“I have loved you like that from the beginning.”
She held my eyes a moment longer than I expected. “I know.”
We stayed where we were a long beat after that. The Descent was still on the wall behind her. The mourners were still doing their four-hundred-year work, and we let her two words sit in the cold of the cathedral until the cold had taken them in, and then we walked the length of the nave slowly, side by side, the way two people walk when one of them has just said the thing the other has waited a long time to hear. Outside, the January air was the temperature I had been inside since the morning. We found a café.
It was off the Groenplaats, wood-paneled and warm, smelling of roasted coffee and warm butter and the faint yeast of the morning’s bread. They brought me a hot chocolate dense enough that the spoon stood up in it, the Belgian kind that is less a drink than a confession, and for her a plate of speculoos, the thin spiced biscuits that carry the bite of cinnamon and clove and the brown-sugar warmth the Low Countries have loved since the spice ships first came up the Scheldt. She wrapped both hands around her cup and watched me across the steam, the left corner of her mouth rising first, the way it always rises first.
I have watched her in the great dining rooms of the world, in couture, under chandeliers, and I will tell you that she is no more and no less herself with a cheap biscuit in a paneled café in a cold city than she is at any table where the cutlery is weighed before it is laid. That is the whole of her. The setting changes and she does not.
“Ghent tomorrow,” she said.
“The Altarpiece.”
“And then?”
“Bruges. The Madonna.”
“Good.”
We dined that night near the cathedral, grey shrimp croquettes and then sole off the bone for her, a beef carbonnade for me, the beef gone soft after hours in dark Flemish beer. Afterward, at the hotel, I poured a bourbon and she took a glass of something a monk had made, a Trappist ale the color of mahogany that she pronounced, after long and serious consideration, “a serious drink, made by serious men who are not allowed to do anything else.” We slept under a heavy duvet in a cold room with the radiator ticking, and the city went quiet around us, and a few streets off, in the dark, Rubens’s dead Christ went on coming down the canvas toward the arms that would not catch him in time.
Ghent
The train took thirty-eight minutes. Flemish farmland passed in a wash of grey-green and brown, the occasional village spire arguing for verticality in a landscape that had decided, long ago and firmly, in favor of the horizontal. Pollard willows stood in flooded fields. A heron held itself still in a ditch. I watched the light, which in that country in winter is a low and lateral thing, the light Vermeer and de Hooch were born into and understood better than any painters in history, the light that taught a whole people to prize the way a thing is lit above the thing itself. She watched me.
Ghent announced itself with less swagger than Antwerp. Canals, cobblestones, the dark water of the Leie, guild houses crowding the quays with their stepped gables, a city that had been one of the richest in Europe when wool was money and had kept its medieval bones the way a careful family keeps its silver. We walked into the old center along streets that narrowed under the weight of their own history, to St. Bavo’s Cathedral, and entered through the west door, and there it was, behind glass, in its own chapel: the thing we had come for.
Ghent has never been a city that takes instruction. Charles V was born here and it rose against him anyway, and when he had put the revolt down he marched its leaders through the streets in their shirts with nooses around their necks, as a lesson. Ghent took the insult and kept it. To this day its people call themselves the Stroppendragers, the noose-bearers, and say it with their chins up. A city that can turn its worst humiliation into a name it wears with pride has understood something I have spent a good part of my life trying to learn.
The Ghent Altarpiece. Twelve panels. Two registers. Jan van Eyck finished it in 1432, his brother Hubert having died before it was done, and in the six centuries since it has been, by a wide margin, the most coveted object in the history of European art.
I told her its story while we stood before it, because the story is part of what you see. It has been stolen more often than any painting on earth. Calvinists nearly burned it. Napoleon carried panels off to Paris. The Germans took it in the first war and the Treaty of Versailles ordered it back. A local man stole two panels in 1934 and confessed on his deathbed, and the confession led nowhere, and one of those panels, the Just Judges, has never been found; what hangs in its place is a careful copy, so that the most famous altarpiece in the world has, to this day, a hole in it where a man’s greed used to be. The Nazis took the whole of it next and hid it in an Austrian salt mine wired with explosives, and a small band of men whom history would later call the Monuments Men got it out in the last days of the war. It has survived everything the centuries could throw at it, and it is also incomplete, and the two facts have learned to live inside the same frame.
But it was not the history that undid me. It was the detail.
The lower center panel held the Lamb upon an altar, its white fleece incandescent against a meadow of an impossible green, blood running from its breast into a golden chalice. And around it, everywhere, van Eyck had done the thing no one before him had known how to do and few since have done as well. Pearls on the hem of a saint’s robe, each holding the reflection of a window that exists nowhere but in the painter’s mind. The individual threads in the carpet beneath the Virgin’s feet. The reflection of a Gothic window in a gemstone no larger than a grain of rice, invisible to the naked eye and rendered with the same uncompromising care as the central Lamb. He had painted the world the way a man paints who is afraid of missing any of it.
He had looked at the world the way she looks at me.
“The green,” she said beside me, her breath briefly fogging the glass. “How did he make that green?”
I could not answer her.
“Are you all right?”
I nodded. She waited, and did not press, and after a moment laid her hand flat between my shoulder blades, which is a thing she does when she has decided that a man needs an anchor and should not be made to ask for one.
She kept her hand there until I could breathe normally, which was longer than I will tell you, and then she moved it to my arm, and we stood in front of the Lamb a while longer without speaking, because we both understood that the painting was not finished with me yet and that the polite thing was to let it finish. When we finally turned and walked back along the nave and out through the west door of St. Bavo’s, I felt the way a man feels after a long swim in deep water: a little hollowed, a little cleaner, and not yet entirely returned.
Outside, we walked the Graslei in the failing afternoon. The guild houses lined the canal, their stepped facades doubled in water so dark and so still that Ghent existed twice, the real city and its drowned twin, divided by nothing but a pane of black glass. It was half past three and the light was already going, the kind of early Flemish dark that makes a lit window look like a kept secret. She bought two paper cones of frites near the Korenmarkt, thick-cut and double-fried and impossibly crisp, and we stood on the bridge over the Leie eating them with little wooden forks and looking back at the three towers of Ghent rising in a row against the dusk: St. Nicholas’, the Belfry, St. Bavo’s. She licked the salt from her fingertips with an easy abandon I find, as I find all her small surrenders to pleasure, quietly devastating.
“Tomorrow,” she said.
“The Madonna.”
“Yes.”
She looked at me across the bridge, and the strand the wind had pulled loose from under her hat stayed where it had fallen, and she let it, because she had long ago stopped doing for mirrors what she does not do for me.
Bruges
Bruges in January is a city suspended in amber, and we reached it on a morning so cold and so still that the canals had begun to ice at their edges, thin crusts of silver-white reaching from the stone embankments toward the black water at the center. The summer crowds were long gone. The town belonged, as it should, to the people who live in it and to the cold.
We left our bags at the hotel and walked the town first, because Bruges is a place you should meet on foot before you ask anything of it. It is the city time forgot to ruin: one of the great ports of medieval Europe until the channel that fed it silted up and the trade moved on to Antwerp, and the money left, and the leaving was the saving of it, because a city no one troubles to modernize is a city that keeps its face. They call it the Venice of the North, which does it a disservice; it is more itself than that. We crossed the Markt under the Belfort, the great leaning bell-tower, its carillon letting a cascade of notes down over the square at the quarter hour, and we walked the canals where the ice had taken the edges and a single swan moved through the black center, leaving a slow wake behind it.
She wanted to see the Begijnhof, the beguinage, so we went. It is a walled court near the Minnewater, a quadrangle of white houses set around a green planted with tall bare poplars, and for some seven hundred years it was home to the beguines: laywomen who lived together in devotion and useful work, who prayed and nursed and made the lace this city was famous for, who took no final vows and wore no chains, who were free to leave whenever they wished and to marry if they chose, and who, in their thousands, across the centuries, mostly did not. The gate stood open. The court was silent in the cold. A few Benedictine sisters keep the quiet going there now. Her Highness stood under the bare poplars with her hands buried in her coat and read the small plaque, and then she said the thing I had been thinking before I had finished thinking it.
“They weren’t required to stay,” she said. “They stayed.”
I did not answer. The plaque did not need my help, and neither did she.
We had lunch out of the cold in a low room off a side street: a black pot of mussels for her, steamed open in white wine and celery and a fistful of parsley, an emptied shell used as the tongs for the next, and for me a plate of stoofvlees, beef stewed dark and sweet for hours in brown ale, served, because this is Belgium and Belgium is serious about precisely two things, with a cone of frites and a good mustard. She worked through the mussels with the focused contentment of a woman who has found the best thing on the table and intends to do it justice.
In the afternoon we went to the Church of Our Lady. Its brick tower climbs some five hundred feet into the cold, the tallest brickwork in the Low Countries, raised by men who wanted to put something of their own between themselves and heaven and who, having no stone to hand, did it in the clay beneath their feet.
We entered through the south portal into grey light and hushed stone, and in the south aisle, behind glass, stood the reason we had come.
The Madonna and Child. Michelangelo.
The only sculpture he allowed to leave Italy in his lifetime. Two Bruges cloth merchants, brothers, bought her and carried her north over the Alps and set her here, where she has remained, mostly, ever since. Mostly, because she too has been taken. The French carried her off after their Revolution and gave her back. The Germans took her in 1944, in the same retreat that nearly cost the world the Ghent Altarpiece, smuggled her out of this church laid on a mattress in the back of a Red Cross truck, and hid her in the same Austrian salt mine, and the same small band of men dug her out of the dark and brought her home. Twice this city has watched her leave and twice it has got her back, and she stands here now behind her glass with the particular composure of a thing that has learned it can be taken and has decided not to let the knowledge show on its face.
She is smaller than you expect. Perhaps four feet. Her robes fall around her in folds so fluid the marble has forgotten it was ever stone. The Christ child stands between her knees, one foot already forward, ready to step off her body and into the world. His left hand rests on his mother’s hand: a child touching his mother without thinking, the way a child does, before he has learned that the hand will not always be there to touch.
And her face.
Michelangelo’s Virgin looks down and slightly away from the child, her expression filled with a knowledge that runs the whole length of the arc she already sees: the ministry, the betrayal, the cross. She has seen all of it. What he carved into her is not grief, not yet, only the foreknowledge of grief, a mother who knows that the most precious thing she will ever hold is also the most temporary, that the child whose weight she carries is already, in some irreversible way, leaving her, and who holds him anyway, with both hands, in the full knowledge of how it ends.
Her Highness stood very still for a long time. Then she turned to me, her eyes bright with the aftermath of being moved.
“She knows,” she said softly. “She already knows everything that’s going to happen. And she stays.”
I looked at the Madonna. At the downcast eyes. At the mouth held in the impossibly narrow country between a smile and grief. At the hand resting on the hand of the child who was already leaving.
“You have been her,” I said.
She did not answer for a long moment. Then, very quietly: “I know.”
The Merchant House
We walked back along the Dijver in the failing light, past the canals and the belfry, past windows going amber one by one against the grey, past a swan asleep with its head folded under its wing in the half-frozen water. Neither of us said anything. There are afternoons that have said enough already and know it.
Our hotel was a converted merchant’s house near the Burg, low and old, the timber beams in the ceiling gone black with five centuries of smoke, a fire already lit in the grate when we came in. The building had belonged to a cloth merchant, in the years when Bruges cloth was the best in the world, which meant that some long-dead man had once counted his fortune in the room where I was about to lose hold of myself. I went to the sideboard and poured a bourbon, neat, because my hands wanted something to do, and pouring is a thing a man’s hands can do when the rest of him is not to be trusted. She went to the window and stood looking out at the canal.
“Tell me what you understood,” she said, without turning.
I had meant to answer her cleanly. I have spent my life answering cleanly; it is among the things I am known for, in the rooms where I am known. But the three churches were still in me, the raised cross and the lowered body and the green that no one can explain and the small marble mother holding the child who was leaving, and when I opened my mouth the clean answer was not there. What came out came in pieces, and slowly, and not in my own steady voice, and I let it, because she had asked, and because there was no longer any version of the evening in which I kept it all behind the wall.
“That I have been the slow one,” I said.
She did not turn from the window. “Yes.”
“That you have been carrying it for both of us. That you saw, a long time ago, the thing the Madonna sees. How it ends.”
“Yes.”
“And that you stayed anyway. That you have been staying anyway, the whole time, while I was still catching up to what you already knew.”
She turned then. She crossed the room and put her hand against my cheek, and her hand was cold from the window glass, and I did not care.
“And I still stay,” she said.
I could not speak, and I am not ashamed to write it down. A man who has stood in front of four hundred years of other men’s grief and other men’s love, made by hands that wanted to keep what they loved and knew they could not, and who has beside him the one person who has been quietly doing the same for him, carrying the knowledge of the ending so that he could be spared it a little longer, does not always get to keep his voice. I did not keep mine.
She took my hand and laid it flat over her heart and held it there, and I felt the beat of it under my palm, steady and unhurried and entirely unafraid, the heart of a woman who has already done the arithmetic and chosen the sum.
We did not go out again. Later she slept against my shoulder with one hand open on my chest, the way the child’s marble hand had lain open on his mother’s, and I lay awake and listened to the carillon mark the hours over the frozen town, and did not try to improve on the day. It had said what it came to say.
Outside, Bruges settled deeper into its amber. The canals took the last of the light and kept it. And a few streets away, in the south aisle of the Church of Our Lady, the small marble mother went on holding her child in the dark, knowing how it ends, staying, the way the truest things stay: not because they do not know better, but because they do.