To the Master Engraver Jules de Bruyker

It had been raining since dawn. Damp had made my room as foul-smelling as a cave and its light was really that of a crypt where I was moldering, looking at tears streaming down the window and feeling that I was gradually swelling up with water absorbed through my pores. It seemed that this rain would last forever. I was surrounded by a pervasive odor of old scrapheaps and, since everything smelled, my body emitted the smell that tramps carry in their rags. My thoughts, like a bottle imp, slowly sank under the pressure of the opaque sky. And this inexorable descent into the void constituted a palpable but unspeakably horrible torture. Is it conceivable that a man in a room, unmoving and apparently impassive, could stand to feel his soul smothered without groaning, writhing, or praying?

As the day flowed by I sank lower and lower, my thoughts pulsing more and more feebly, but without obliterating themselves as I wished they would. And I was gripped by a premonition that this afternoon the world would come to an end, that the world could end in no other way. Our world wouldn’t explode in a glorious detonation; it was becoming a ball of mud, peeling, rotting, hydropic, destroyed by water, a miserable humanity returning to its primordial marshlands where elementary life fermented, filthy living debris, deaf and blind . . . Such were my thoughts, creeping like long worms, until the moment when my consciousness was sucked down into a muddy sleep.

Emerging from that low stupor, it seemed to me I was climbing back up toward the mouth of a pit. The rain had stopped. And my window allowed a singularly strong and heavy light to unfurl in the interior, one whose brutal, almost material flow pushed everything aside. That intense luminosity astonished me. It was no longer day, but night could not have fallen yet, and the sunset sky, a shattered mirror, had to exist somewhere behind the fissured wall of the rain. This light seemed truly liquid, lacking vibrancy and as though everything it touched was left coated with glycerine. Worried by that shaft of light, I got up from my damp couch, managing my limbs with difficulty. I staggered, trying to gain my balance, and the fear of no longer finding anything solid in the three dimensions of my room redoubled my disquiet. Was the cave now transforming itself into an aquarium, and was I going to find myself incapable of useful action, deprived of part of my weight? This fear of being stripped of my humanity revived my instincts and I threw myself toward the door with the movements of a swimmer. I felt somewhat reassured on running down the stairs but only recovered adequate confidence when I made contact with the street pavement, with the terrestrial globe that my fantasy had imagined lost. And I moved forward along the walls in search of the city and those who lived in it.

Scarcely any living beings to be seen; the city still existed, a charcoal mass, all outcrops and passages, still streaming with water and drifting in the ashen atmosphere without a guiding light, like a piece of flotsam. It beggared belief that no one was doing anything to fight the encroaching darkness, that not one lamp had been lit, that not one window glowed anywhere . . . Thankfully the air was breathable and not chilly, though autumn was advancing; old heat still lingered, discharged from the ground. My body had been rescued and it wasn’t long before I discovered what was pressing down on my soul. Coming out onto the level area that surrounds the church of St. Nicholas, where a hundred passageways and blind alleys come to discharge themselves as though into a vat, I surprised the secret of the deathly torpor, the lethargy that still suffused the city, similar in every respect to what I had suffered; just then the sky appeared to me, unexpectedly, like the sea discovered at the summit of a ramp; a bizarre, sunken sky, out of a prehistoric fantasia and made up of an accumulation of gaseous grottos. And these cloudy pockets seethed with light, a cold and slobbering light that you could have cut with a knife; a poisonously tinted light, slowly ejaculated . . . It looked to me like the invention of a possessed or mad painter. The discovery of this catastrophic sky awakened my sense of oppression and, simultaneously, my feeling that the Earth and the species pullulating on its crusts were threatened by an imminent calamity. I couldn’t accept that I was witnessing a twilight at its moment of crisis, a luminous orgasm. My mind as much as my eyes questioned this impossible sky, because it was an inverted echo of the entrails and abominable fluxes of the globe, and also because this meteorological phenomenon seemed to me, if I dare write this, a monstrous error of nature . . . And I hid my inflamed eyes.

Freeing them after they had been rested, I saw that the aerial grottos had vanished and that the pallid twilit screen displayed a scene that was no less delirious; the clouds were outlined in relief and, in a sculpted frieze, depicted a pitiless scramble of cattle, ochre‑, brown‑, and blue-colored, a silent charge toward the gates of sunset. But everywhere the herds were surrounded by the darkness that had provoked the disaster, the panicked outlines drowned in black ink. Was I alone in contemplating these visions? Living souls sheltering in their dwellings obstinately persisted in leaving their lamps unlit. Did they reckon that the night wasn’t yet at its darkest? The taverns that usually yawned open like so many outlets of hell round the grounds of the church, even they didn’t send out their red glow! Nevertheless the city wasn’t dead; it was in a deep sleep and would awaken late. The few shadows that stole by in the distance couldn’t be those of passersby, rather of sleepers in search of matches. Was I going to remain petrified in the middle of this square where pools of mud surrounded me? The mud came out of the paving stones or else flowed like fetid lava from the hundred passageways, hypocritically filling the vat of St. Nicholas. And the danger posed by my solitude was heightened by banks of fog hovering as high as a man, where there was nothing to hold onto should the ground shift even more. A place of immediate refuge offered itself: the church, just like in the fearful days of wrath when people believed that the end of the world was nigh.

This decrepit church, so old and so shaken by the winds, was well qualified to awaken the idea of peril. Good people said that it constituted a perpetual miracle and a proof of Providence in action inasmuch as it never crumbled away, as in all logic it ought to have done on every day granted by God. Constructed in a quagmire, mistreated and set on fire a score of times, it persisted like an aged, decalcified body, all wounds and excrescences, standing thanks only to the crutches of its buttresses. Eroded by bad weather and dislocated by the water that swelled its porous walls, it endured only by the rights granted to phantoms, a shadow of a church that no archaeologist would have dared to touch for fear of seeing it collapse into debris. Nevertheless it regained its resilience and its primitive prestige in the darkness, and with its sheer walls and fortress-like central tower it appeared imperishable. I reached its porch, pushing at creaking partitions, stumbling on broken steps, believing myself descending, and descending in fact, for over the course of the ages the church had seen the ground rise around its walls, unless it happened to have sunk on its foundations. And I had the feeling of having fallen into a trap. I was in a grotto that was almost dark, but one where threatening, phosphorescent statues lay in ambush at various levels, where flights of columns formed frightening labyrinths. My eyes begged in vain for the illumination of a candle. From whence did all this fluorescence seep if not the stone itself? Or was it nothing but the glow emanating from the innumerable dead buried in the naves? I went down the axis of the chancel, advancing with outstretched arms, hypnotized by a distant tongue of purple fire licking at the void. The memorial slabs shifted under my feet. I breathed in funereal smells too, a latent decay added to which were rank odors, rancid incense. The mud of the city was no longer a threat, but didn’t the flagstones of this religious charnel house themselves constitute a trap that was no less dreadful? Ah! If I were to sink down into the muck from which these enormous cryptogamous pillars had grown! . . . Who then would stretch out a hand to save me? There was no one in this church, and I repeated in a loud voice and without awakening any echo, “Is there nobody here? . . .”

There was someone, against whom I had just stumbled: a Christ collapsed against a column and regally offended under his crown of thorns; he confronted me with the horrifying face of a torture victim, his grimace intolerable, the contorted mouth of a man strangled with a garrote. I was truly in despair at having to disappear without remission for my sins, and, my voice failing me, only my lips continued to murmur their plea: “Miserere!” No, there was no one in this gigantic cavern, under these crumbling vaults; no one to bear witness to the despairing death that would be mine. At first I’d pretended to feel nothing, but the evidence was clear; the church was inexorably foundering and I was sinking down with it, sucked down by the depth, in an abyss of foul mud; the vessel was going down, broken apart, and even if my reason refused to admit it my feet and legs knew it. Had I cried too loudly to heaven that I was abandoned? God abruptly manifested Himself to reply to me that He was still there even if no one else was, infallibly above and beyond disasters; He threw me a lifeline . . . By a miracle I was able to seize a rope. It was salvation, or death postponed. I must have arrived under the central tower. With this cable I could reach the vault, the roofs of that crenellated tower where the errant bells were sleeping; with them I would be able to sound the alarm, but at what cost, of such a climb. Besides, I needed to awaken them to save myself and, at the same time, rouse the town from its torpor by means of this tocsin that hadn’t sounded since the wars. How vigorously I grasped the rope, bending my knees like a gymnast, the better to jump. But at that moment a second miracle occurred: a golden tone broke out, solemnly, a voice of pure metal releasing a loud cry that spread out, undulating in the silence. That happened angelically, without my intervention. A gong sounded the hour of a mystery. Only a supernatural fist could have struck the golden hour over the abyss of Time . . . At this signal, the chancel filled up with an amber vapor, the pillars regained solidity and the naves unfolded harmoniously. The dislocated church remade itself geometrically, under the orders of an invisible architect that was nothing but light. Candles lit up like stars. The mortuary slabs once more steadied themselves. And with the advent of priests resembling bronzed birds, and who sought to exorcise the darkness with their gestures, I felt a fierce gratitude toward the magical Consciousness that prevented the world from perishing on this day of deluge. Everywhere human forms arose and went forward, like resurrected beings emerging from the walls and the pavements. These shades, were they singing, and were the organs expelling the opaque air of their lungs? This collective song might have been thought the voice of a crowd processing in the open air around the church; the song had barbaric overtones, though its inspiration seemed to be sacred. This vocal drone that I wasn’t able to identify didn’t fail to comfort me, just as the renewal of light had done, and it was without fear that I undertook to exit the church, climbing back up to the surface of the city without further difficulty.

Night had fallen, completely. Countless streetlights blazed, the façades wore their familiar faces. Living beings moved about in the reconsolidated city. And the precincts of St. Nicholas were swarming as in times of fairs and cavalcades. The church was encircled by herds. The cattle arrived in abundance, crossing the city from one end to the other, through the old passageways, with St. Nicholas as the cauldron that provided the terminus. It was the night of their holocaust. Their bellows fluctuated, melting together and making a deep pedal note that was counterpointed by sharp bleats and joyful barks. And the majestic cohorts were whipped on by mighty curses. I moved forward, squeezed between the oxen, lost in that flood of rumps and muzzles. The world hadn’t come to an end; the world smelled carnally after the deluge. And, under the lunar searchlights, I went with the musical and so fatally beautiful herds, deported to the cruel abattoirs where the beasts are sacrificed, their blood flowing in torrents in order to appease, who knows which, the wrath of the gods or the hunger of men . . .

The post A Twilight appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Spells

Permeating these works is a fascination with urban life—European city life circumscribes the consciousness of the protagonists in most of these stories.  In their urban wanderings, buildings and public squares become a kind of living relic of history looming over the moments of citizens and revealing that the relationship between past and present is far more complex than we often assume, and that it may be more of a two-way street than we’d like to believe.  The secrets lurking behind the 20th century European streets, tucked away in obscure courtyards, or hidden in the inventory of a forgotten shop call to mind some of the same fascinations of setting that one encounters in the New York- and Paris-set weird fiction of Robert Chambers, or perhaps Jean Ray’s “The Shadowy Street,” which literalizes this general idea and builds an entire plot out of it.

Even as there is temptation, generally speaking, to account for great evil by turning to the supernatural, de Ghelderode’s fiction takes care not to entirely remove it from human agency.  It seems safe to assume that this tendency is at least in part abetted influenced by Europe’s escalation into World War II that would have been contemporaneous with the creation of many of these stories.  Threaded through virtually all of them are persistent reminders that hell might well exist entirely independent of a supernatural order: “Why, this is hell!  It’s this monstrous city, its everyday existence. And the damned? They’re my hideous fellow men and me too in their sordid flock!.” (“The Devil in London,” 29)  The observable and rational are sufficient in some ways to account for the idea of hell, and yet the devil may ultimately put in an appearance anyhow.  The ennui that pervades “The Devil in London” and “The Collector of Relics” evokes the sense that this corporeal existence is simply not the one we were meant to inhabit, a sentiment that will strike many readers as sharing a kinship with the modern author Thomas Ligotti.  If the book stumbles on occasion, its main obstacle is an excessive reliance on the same character type that so frequently makes such observations as the one above: the lone, depressed, sick, unmoored, solitary male wanderer in search of distraction from the malaise of the mundane.  Or a “demoralized soul,” as he puts it in “Fog.”  Indeed, one might lift any number of lines from these stories and find sentiments common to both Ligotti and de Ghelderode.  In “Rhotomago,” the protagonist exclaims that he “… pursued my own journey into the unfathomable, dreaming that for once I was sleeping without dreaming!” (83)

The strength of prose and complexity of theme are more than sufficient to recommend the book despite the limitations imposed by the use of relatively unvaried protagonists, but it will likely stand out as a weakness to some and has been discussed by scholars engaged with de Ghelderode’s work:

“Voiced by dedicated solitaries, the narratives discount social or even human relationships…Women too are in short supply; Ghelderode, in a draft prospectus for a planned further collection of stories, promised that women would feature more centrally but, as it turned out, no such stories were written.” (Introduction, x).

Women characters are certainly in short supply; however, it is a mistake to view the “dedicated solitary” as necessarily eschewing the importance of social and human relationships.  It seems not just shortsighted but counterproductive of de Ghelderode to craft so many tales in which the thesis is that “hell” could consist of “this monstrous city” and “my fellow men” but then have a glaring omission of such a large demographic that could add more depth to such treatments.  However, that caveat aside, I submit that the frequent juxtaposition of supernatural and sociohistorical forces under which the protagonists labor is done precisely as a means not of discounting social relationships but of critiquing them from a broader perspective, even as de Ghelderode’s critique could be improved if it were broader still in terms of which people are represented in the story.  It is worth noting a distinction between a lack of close friendships as a “solitary” (this is certainly true of most of the protagonists) and a discounting of human relationships entirely.  Introverted though the narrators may be, there is ample direct, ground-level social interaction that forms crucial components of plot and serves as a vehicle for such critiques, particularly in stories like “The Collector of Relics, “You Were Hanged,” and “The Odor of Pine.”

Octave Mirbeau

Although both Ligotti and de Ghelderode have clear predecessors in the Decadent movement, we can see a much closer connection to the Decadents with the historically proximate Belgian fantasist.  Echoes of French author Octave Mirbeau abound in the cynical frankness and casual cruelty with which one character in the story “You Were Hanged” discusses old and new means of execution contrived by societies in different historical periods.  The characters in most of the stories commit their fair share of transgressions, but the author is careful to foreground such individual ignoble acts against a backdrop of larger systemic cruelties like executions, which comprise an essential part of the structure of sociohistorical power operating in conjunction with the supernatural of de Ghelderode’s fiction.  The hypocrisy that underlies the use of powerful institutional violence against individual transgressors of social order is a theme that one will find in many forms in such literature, and it features prominently in this collection as well.  For example, one of the strongest stories, “You Were Hanged,” takes as its premise a discussion about state-sanctioned violence and explores differing moral responses to it as its specific tools of execution change with history, and supernatural events force the protagonist to confront such horrors from a perspective uncannily removed from the present in an effort to dissect the idea of “progress.”  The recursive relationship between materialist and supernatural concerns is introduced immediately in the first story, “The Public Scribe,” which features a wax dummy “tasked” with recording the ephemera of history in the material form of writing while undergoing a transformation that could not be accounted for by material processes.  Events disembodied by time become history, and here history becomes reembodied as it reattains material form.  The animation of abstractions like time and history recurs frequently throughout the collection and reveals an underlying anxiety about the power they hold over life.

While any astute reader will undoubtedly come away with a great deal to digest from these stories in terms of philosophical discussion, the literary craftsmanship that makes them so effective is remarkable.  Returning for a moment to “You Were Hanged,” for example, one can note several details that at first appear trivial but are threaded through the story such that the conclusion renders a completely different and nuanced significance to them than expected.  The cumulative effect of this is also contingent on any number of subtleties of language that seem to have been well preserved by the translator:

“I was under the clear impression that I’d been in that place [Saint-Jacques Plain] forever, and that my existence had never extended beyond that oblong square.” (153)

In a brief sentence and with the pointed use of “oblong”, de Ghelderode and Maclennan create a complex symbol that coheres perfectly with the themes of the story and the larger collection by inextricably entwining life, death, and social constructs that precede and survive the individual.  In this story as in several others, time and history explicitly become forces alive in ways that are usually invisible to us.  One might well encounter “the breathing of clocks” (159) in an inn adjacent to a setting of historical cruelties.  Sometimes this is direct and catastrophic and at others more restrained in a manner that might remind readers of Dick’s The Man in the High Castle.  In much the way that an innocuous post in a wall may in another era have been the final destination for a condemned person, de Ghelderode frequently explores the significance of the idea of the historical relic in changing social contexts: common items afforded outsized importance as a byproduct of human action, history being an amalgamation whose power becomes greater than the sum of its parts and in turn acts on its descendants.  Many of the stories here are built around a “tunneling” effect of time, with two sets of significant events set apart by a lengthy interval during which the narration distances itself from events on the ground.  The cumulative effect is a volume of weird tales that remind the reader that history asserts itself upon the individual even while quietly hiding in the background.

“The Public Scribe” serves as one of the more subtle treatments of the erosive effects of time on human existence. In it we see a plot device, the infamous mannequin, that has become a fairly commonplace fixture of the weird.  The animate and the inanimate are juxtaposed in an exploration of the ways in which the uncanny valley of the mannequin threatens to usurp the former.  De Ghelderode himself wrote plays for marionettes and was influenced by puppet theater, and he seems to have a particular fascination with exploring exactly where the border between life and not-life resides (or if it can be safely said to exist at all).  Perhaps he’s drawing on his fascination with time and asking us, “what is a mannequin but the appearance of humanity frozen in an instant of time?”  Throughout the collection are frequent appearances of masks and other similar manifestations of these themes. Their usage in a context that consistently emphasizes the degradation and horror of corporeal existence begs the question:  which is truly the more unsettling prospect–attaining human consciousness or experiencing the loss of it?  The author is careful to present both sides of the equation in “The Public Scribe.”  If from the broader perspective of history the human condition is akin to “musical and so fatally beautiful herds, deported to the cruel abattoirs where the beasts are sacrificed.” (“A Twilight”, 146), then it seems a foregone conclusion to de Ghelderode that neither prospect could be a clear preference, and therein lives true horror.

De Ghelderode’s sense of the fantastic exists at times within a Christian context and at others within an apparently invented, at-times haphazard one that achieves much by way of implication and subtlety, even as it remains unclear as to whether the author aspired to create a singular mythos like Chambers’s King in Yellow tales.  In Chambers, there is a constant current of madness and the incomprehensible lurking just beneath the surface of events, and de Ghelderode’s fiction has a similar quality. This is significant especially when considering the biographical data; as the author fell into ill health in the time preceding and during the stories’ creation, scholar Roland Bayen conjectures that his “stories bear witness to an ‘increasing neurosis’, indeed are ‘the fruits of crisis’” (Introduction, viii).  But Chambers is not the only fixture of the weird that we might be tempted to admit to the discussion.  The hallucinatory, landscape-disrupting visions that occur in several of the tales in Spells have a vivid, bold, and intense quality.  For an author with such an interest in place and its influence on consciousness, it is not surprising that crises of the personal are strongly linked to crises of geography and the like.  In particular, such an occurrence in “Fog” might well remind readers of Belgian contemporary Jean Ray’s story “The Mainz Psalter”, with both stories featuring conjurations of hidden worlds lurking adjacent to our own.  De Ghelderode writes:

“During this respite I entertained many such speculations, and all the more easily in that I didn’t have to deal with my usual rational self. Alas! No ecstasy goes without a reversal.  The state of grace left me.  And I felt myself in danger.  Streams of lights climbed the walls, this time coming from down below, coarse reflections of nocturnal fairs lit up with opaque red and green smoke. What I saw could only be an invention of delirium: mouths once more, down at ground level and reaching toward me.  A monstrous host surrounded me of which only the mouths were visible.  Oh! Abject mucous membranes salivating and spitting, swallowing words that I sensed were sordid and that I congratulated myself on not understanding…I was abruptly galvanized by the image of a nearby hell over which I was cataleptically suspended.” (136)

In Spells, there is a malevolence to the universe that becomes apparent whenever the supernatural manifests on the page, but the author is careful to always give the devil his due and remind the reader that human action and events play a part in that malevolence.  There’s a persistent association of social evils and the uncanny, particularly as in “You Were Hanged” and “The Odor of Pine”.  Readers will also note a more direct engagement with real-world religion than in many of the authors of weird tales to which he’s most comparable, which is perhaps not surprising given the overlapping of theme with preceding European authors like Mirbeau, who wrote nothing of the supernatural but obsessively critiqued the real-life figures purporting to be conduits to it.  De Ghelderode’s writing has been described by scholars as anticlerical, but his fascination with religious relics, churches, and other physical remnants of Christian belief systems reveals what seems best described as nostalgia made problematic and ambiguous by the ways in which he ties such holy artifacts to social ills.  Mortal sin, atonement, and many other religious constructs form the core of anxiety that plagues some of the protagonists, but they exist alongside and entwined with the materialism represented by real historical tribulations that seem to carry an equal weight that survives into the present.  In “The Collector of Relics,” for example, norms of both religious and secular life are simultaneously tested and transgressed by the protagonist as a byproduct of his own personal contrarian obsessions.  As the narrator states regarding whether or not to discover what might lurk inside a dim antiques shop: “I’ve found myself tempted to cross the threshold.” (69)  Like Bataille’s Story of the Eye, there is an animus in the character that conflates these two categories of social norms under a reactionary, impulsive, and accelerating disgust.  It becomes clear by the conclusion of “The Collector of Relics” that the reader would be advised to allow for multiple interpretations of the idea of crossing thresholds as the protagonist continually pressures the collector to pursue progressively more taboo objectives, and the preservation of this ambiguity in translation is vital for understanding the story.

De Ghelderode’s fiction has not been broadly available to English readers, and this edition of Spells will hopefully do its part to remedy that.  The consistent execution and thought-provoking, nuanced premises in these stories are enough to render them overlooked classics (at least, to non-Belgian audiences)—there are no real low points to speak of, and it seems unsurprising that the stories are among the final efforts produced by an author with a lengthy and well-developed body of work.  In short, Spells will have much to say, some of it new and some of it quite familiar, to most readers of the weird.

The post Review: “Spells” by Michel de Ghelderode appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

— David Davis, Translator

After a long voyage, marked by a few incidents not worth reporting, I arrived here at last.

I am sitting at a table in one of the city’s main restaurants. The regular swing of a punkah¹ cools the air, that impregnated with a moist heat, is suffocating. I just finished a conversation that shook me up; I am still trembling with astonishment. I dare not entrust this extraordinary incident to my memory; it is better to write it down right away.

I have known for some years a wealthy Dutch family, settled in Rotterdam. The Van Camps were once intrepid colonists in Oceania. Since then, they have founded a vast commercial empire of colonial commodities in their motherland, ceaselessly prospering under a bold and strong leadership, passed from father to son.

The reputation of this firm of old stock is one of the most well established in the great Dutch port.

As a child, I played with the Van Camps’ son, Hendricus, a lad of strong appearance like all those in his family, but one whose character was revealed, immediately in his youth, to be completely different from that of his ancestors.

The young Hendricus was a dreamer, shy, sweet as a little girl, and of a sensitivity truly unimaginable. I remember a few traits of his character that were quite unusual in this family of pragmatic business men. At the age when other Van Camps would begin to start commercial operations, it was not uncommon to find Hendricus in the street playing with children younger than him. Once even, he distributed among his friends all the money he had in his pockets. Another time, in the dead of winter, he returned to his parents, freezing, shivering with cold; he had given his coat to a drunkard who aroused his sympathy by pretending to be miserable.

***

On the advice of a friend of the family, the old Mr. Van Camp decided to send his son to the colonies.

He had been offered a rather lucrative position in charge of the Administration of Affairs of State in Batavia². The father hoped that these constant and positive occupations would teach his son to become better adjusted. However, his farewell had a severity which I found shocking; he would not accompany the young man to the boat. So it was I who drove Hendricus to the port to embark.

Several months after his departure, I received a letter from Batavia. Hendricus requested that I ask his father to send him a specific amount of money; I learned that he had quit his job, but he advised me to hide this fact from his family.

Other than this, no detail of this letter seemed to betray any new dispositions of the young man’s character.

Saddened by what I had learned, I went to find the old Van Camp in order to perform the favor my friend had asked of me.

A few more months passed, and I received another letter, stamped from Sumatra.

This time, my surprise was overwhelming. The tone and even the handwriting were totally different; they indicated a complete transformation in the personality of Hendricus. This letter contained only energetic sentences, formed solely of the words inscribed by a steady hand; the young man asked me to find him some houses in Rotterdam which were willing to purchase a new culture of tobacco products from a venture he had setup on the island of Sumatra, a region difficult to colonize, with a deadly climate, and full of pitfalls, savage indigenous people, and a terrain fraught with intractable forests.

I hastened to deliver this amazing news to the old Van Camp. He trembled with joy upon reading the letter from Hendricus and he shook my hand, tears in his eyes.

“It’s definitely him this time,” he said; “I realize now his laziness has passed… He woke up, he’s my son, a true Van Camp, a worthy representative of his ancestry…”

***

We immediately busied ourselves with the affairs of the young man, and for about a year they appeared consistently to prosper. Orders arrived regularly. The old Van Camp was able to boast that his son was finally following in his family’s footsteps.

The letters that Hendricus wrote to us appeared to confirm this view; they always had the firm and energetic tone, which had given me so much surprise, of that first announcement. A detail however perplexed me. In talking of his home, of his plantations, of his life in Sumatra, my friend now employed terms that indicated quite clearly that he was not alone. Everywhere, “we” was replacing the former “me.” In vain I asked about the source of this, but I did not receive a clear response.

After a year, I received a letter, completely out of the blue. Hendricus told me that a revolt had broken out among the workers employed on his plantations, and that he had been forced to find other help because he had killed half of his men with his own hands after quashing the riot.

All this was told in the letter, in brutal terms, almost foul; one could not recognize in these lines the gentle, shy person with whom I had lived in Rotterdam nor the enterprising and positive planter of the previous months.

I could not understand anything about this new change.

The old Van Camp was painfully struck. In consideration of the kindness his entire family had shown me, and in memory of my former relations with his son, he begged me to leave immediately for the colony, to see for myself the mysterious transformation in the character and manner of my friend. He is too old to undertake the journey himself, and the rest of the business keeps him in Holland. It is in order to fulfill this charge that I have come here.

I have just seen Hendricus, and what he has told me exceeds the fantastic ramblings of the most confused and wild mind. I do not know how to interpret his story. Its meaning escapes me. But I will note down its essence, as it was presented in the words of my friend and uncovered through my further personal observations.

On the boat, on his way to the island of Java, Hendricus Van Camp made friends with some Hindu characters who were headed towards Ceylon. They talked of morals and ideas from their countries. The Hindus provided the young Dutchman some detailed explanations of the wisdom and the feats of Yogis, and they related to him some astonishing examples of the ways in which these ascetics illustrated their doctrines.

One can easily imagine that the official functions which brought the young man to Batavia did not motivate him with the necessary zeal. Hendricus Van Camp neglected daily office work to indulge without restraint in his favorite studies, and soon, despite the protections and support that led to his appointment, the officer in charge of colonial administration was given notice to let him go.

It was at this time that he wrote to me to request the sum of money.

Unconcerned by what had happened to him, my friend continued his research. After all sorts of trial and error, and many disappointments, too many to enumerate, he began to direct his will towards a specific purpose: he tried to materialize his own reflection, to bring forth the double that he saw in front of him.

I will not say by what mysterious process, but finally Hendricus was lucky enough to see his efforts succeed; very dimly at first, then with a clarity more and more accentuated, the desired image began to take shape and form in front of him. Then, one day, the perfect double of Hendricus Van Camp stood in the flesh and on two legs.

But there was something quite curious and unexpected: it was a woman.

***

During the first few weeks he lived with this miracle, he could not satisfy himself as to which, this woman or he himself, represented his true nature. However, he soon became acclimated to this duality, and he even began to consider her as one that would live by his side, as a companion he might have chosen freely.

Meanwhile, his character had changed as a result of this extraordinary event. He had become the energetic and determined man that second letter, dated from Sumatra, had so suddenly revealed.

In the company of his partner, and despite enormous difficulties, he had organized a tobacco plantation on the dangerous island, which demanded constant work and continued determination. For many months, the business began to give better results. The zeal and commitment of the young colonizer was such that all his ancestors’ prodigious labors were outdone in a single stroke.

***

After a year of living on their plantation in Sumatra, his double, or his wife, I do not know what to call her, gave birth to a child. (I am retelling what I heard here, at the same table I now write on; I think it’s his voice that dictates the words, his voice as echoed back by the walls and the disordered objects on the table where we had lunch together.)

At the moment of birth, according to his own words, Hendricus Van Camp felt stripped of the childish parts of his personality and character. He lost the constant sensitivity, which had always produced his generous impulses, and that had remained despite the development of the more masculine qualities which enabled him to better manage his business.

Once humane and moderate, almost overnight he became cruel, tough, and pitiless.

It was at this time he committed the murder, needless and terrible, of some of his employees, simply to take revenge for their revolt.

With this new staff, he appeared just as brutal and insensitive. But a strange event once again transformed his character.

This came bit by bit, gradually. Hendricus Van Camp noticed that his double, or his wife, call her what you will, began to lose weight: initially he did not notice, but soon he began to pay better attention to the strange decline. It seemed to him that his partner began to diminish, lose solidity; her complexion also paled day by day, and her strength seemed to evaporate while he himself felt his vigor somewhat reinforced. His companion faded and eventually she vanished altogether.

Left alone with his child, the planter almost unwittingly changed his attitude towards the workers who lived on his land. He lost that pitiless harshness which made him inflict the tough punishments on his men, forcing himself to do the grueling chores. Perhaps he became too lenient because his business began to decline.

A few days before my arrival in Batavia, he saw his child turn wan and seem to wane just as the other had; he observed the same phenomena, the progressive weakening of the flesh, the transparent pallor. A gradual evaporation of all parts of being followed, and finally a complete disappearance, a return to nothingness.

***

My awkward friend confided in me, with an angelic facial expression, that the disappearance of his wife and child did not cause him any pain. On the contrary, he claimed that as he saw them extinguished, he found himself relieved of a cruel weight; a feeling of inner rigidity, that he had felt for some time, left him almost immediately.

On confessing this, Hendricus Van Camp’s face relaxed into that gentle expression I knew well. I peered into his eyes and seemed to discover a new and curious feature: they gave me an impression that I can only describe by comparing the look in them with the look in the eyes of a mother…

In the way of his words and in his gestures, I found the young man sweet, timid, and generous in an old fashioned way. He told me that one thing worried him deeply. It was not the fate of his business; he knew that was lost and that he could no longer fix it. Instead he anxiously wondered what would happen to his staff after the ruin of his business. These men would find themselves without work. Should he not share the money from the liquidation with his employees who were deprived of bread because of him?…

Hearing him say those words, I looked at Hendricus Van Camp in amazement. It seemed that the unforgiving climate of the island had probably altered the mental faculties of my poor friend, and it became absolutely necessary to save him from madness. I told him that his father had sent me and asked him earnestly to return with me to Holland. Timid as a child, he said he would obey.

We leave tomorrow for Europe. The more I think of this story the less I comprehend it. We will see what the doctors in Rotterdam say.

_____

¹ A punkah is a large swinging ceiling fan that originated in Southeast Asia.

² Batavia was the capital of the Dutch East Indies colony which became Indonesia following World War II. Today it is known as Jakarta.

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